Nigerian Stamps and Postal History

I wanted to let my regular readers know that I won't be able to finish my blog post for today. I will however be in  position to publish it either tomorrow late afternoon, or Thursday. My apologies for not having the material ready today. 

Today's will explore the six printings of the 2d blue from the second crown-CC keyplate issue of Lagos. This is a much more difficult stamp to sort than the 1d, due to the number of printings. I believe that the last two printings were comb perforated, while the first four were line perforated. First Printing - Dispatched May 9, 1876 At a mere 106 sheets, of 60 or 6,360 stamps, this is the third scarcest of the six printings. The colour is very distinct, being a clear, dark blue. The colour is the same for both the head plate and the duty plate. The paper is a thin, hard wove paper, that has a fine vertical mesh. The gum is a thin, flat coulourless gum that has a satin sheen. The used examples that I have seen are all canceled with the Lagos diamond barred grid cancel. Here is a scan of the front and back of my only mint example: Notice how dark the blue is. There is no green, but a slight hint of black. This example has full, colourless original gum.  Now ...

Today's post will delve right into the different printings of the second Queen Victoria keyplate issue, with crown CC watermark, starting with the 1d lilac, of which there were 4 printings made between 1876 and 1880. Where we relied heavily on dated used examples to assign specific stamps to a printing with reasonable certainty, we are unable to do so on this issue. Fortunately, we can generally conclude that any comb perforated stamps are from the last, or second last printings and then use the types of cancellations to divide the printings into 2 major groups: 1. Those made prior to 1879, which will usually, but not always be cancelled using a Lagos diamond grid killer. 2. Those made after 1878, which will usually be cancelled with a barred oval grid consisting of either 8 or 9 bars. Thus, where there are 3 or fewer printings, of a stamp, these characteristics alone will generally be sufficient to assign stamps to a particular dispatch with relative confidence. However, wh...

Overview In 1875, De La Rue replaced its perforating machines that had been in use since 1863, with new line machines gauging 14. So, this effectively gave rise to a new issue of stamps, which was identical, in almost every way to the previous issue, except for the perforation, which was now 14, rather than 12.5. What will surprise collectors though is that there were both line and comb versions of this perforation. Stanley Gibbons does not recognize this difference in its listings, though in my opinion, they should, as the comb perforated stamps were generally from the last printings made in November 1880, and were perforated using entirely new machines which were installed by De La Rue in 1878. These machines were distinctly different from the comb 14 machines in use by Somerset House in the sense that Somerset's machines only produced one column of vertical perforations in the gutters between the sheets of 60, which resulted in the wing-margin examples that we see of many ear...

Today's post will deal with the sixth and final value in this first issue of Lagos: the one shilling orange. This stamp had the fewest number of printings, with only four dispatches between November 18, 1874 and May 13, 1875. This post will attempt to explain how to distinguish the four printings of these stamps using the following characteristics: 1. Cancellations. 2. Colour shades. 3. Paper differences. 4. Plate characteristics. The discussion in my first post about the 1d, where I talk about the significance of the various cancellations used on this issue applies equally to this value as well. I am not going to repeat the details of that discussion here, but will instead provide a link to that discussion: http://naijastamps.blogspot.ca/2016/10/distinguishing-six-printings-of-1d.html However, the dates found on the Lagos CDS cancellations can be utilized to distinguish the various printings as follows: First printings will generally be cancelled before May 1875. ...