Nigerian Stamps and Postal History

Overview Today's post will deal with the second most complicated value in this second Queen Victoria series, the 4d rose. There were six printings made between 1876 and 1880, which totaled 959 sheets of 60 stamps (57,540) as follows: May 9, 1876 - 104 sheets or 6,240 stamps. June 12, 1877 - 203 sheets, or 12,180 stamps. August 28, 1878 - 250 sheets, or 15,000 stamps. July 23, 1879 - 102 sheets, or 6,120 stamps. November 26, 1879 - 100 sheets, or 6,000 stamps.  November 18, 1880 - 200 sheets, or 12,000 stamps. The above figures illustrate that while the second, third and last printings, are about equally scarce, the first, fourth and fifth printings are at least twice as scarce as all the others, and in mint condition, should be as scarce as the one shilling, of which 5.760 stamps were issued.  One difficulty with this stamp is that the number of shade combinations for the head plate, and the duty plate, is greater than six, so some printings had more than on...

Overview Today's post will look at the printings of the third value in the second Queen Victoria series of 1876-1880: the 3d red-brown. This stamp overall, is the second scarcest of the six basic denominations, with only 30,120 stamps being printed over four different printings.The last of these, and the only one to be comb perforated, is also a separately listed stamp in Stanley Gibbons, due to the fact that the colour, which is chestnut, instead of the normal red-brown, is a very distinct and different colour. This leaves really only three printings, which all came from the first three London dispatches of stamps for this issue, which were: May 9, 1876 June 12, 1877 August 28, 1878 All three of these are line perforated, so the characteristics that we will be relying on to separate them will be: Shades, particularly differences between the colour of the head plate and the duty plate (words of value). Cancellations - those from the first two printings should be can...