A BNAPS Tutorial for New Collectors - Part 4
ERRORS.It seems we all like to see spot errors. We like watching bloopers on TV, and there are some dandy bloopers in stamp collecting. Unfortunately, the big bloopers are rare and cost plenty to buy. Both the USA and Canada have stamps that have the center part upside-down!! Because that happened to only a few of them, they are very expensive. But there are some errors that maybe you can find at your stamp club, or local stamp store, that are inexpensive but still interesting.
Sometimes the errors are on an entire issue of stamps. Here is an example. Look closely at these stamps and you will find that they forgot to write "postage" and "postes" on these stamps. Remember that Canadian stamps use both English and French on them! They also issued these same stamps with all the proper words on them. Go back and look closely at this one. Interestingly, the cost of buying the ones "with" and the ones "without" the words is about the same - just a few cents for most of them, used.
Many stamps have differences in them that aren't really errors. If you want to spend hours with a magnifying glass looking for small differences in older stamps, try the Canadian "Admirals" issues of 1911-1925! Books have been written about the small plate flaws that crept in over years of usage.
Plate flaws resulted from the fact that early issues were printed from metal plates that contained the images derived from an original engraved plate. Perhaps a sheet would contain 100 images and so the sheets that were printed from them contained 100 stamps.
In recent years, the way that stamps are printed has changed. Sometimes, several different colours are used and errors have resulted from occasions when a colour was missed in the printing. This has resulted in stamps with missing parts of the picture or writing on the stamp. When you bring new stamps home from the Post Office, it always pays to look at them carefully. You might find an error!
Errors also occur in the perforations. There are many stamps that have perfs running right through the middle of them! Some people collect these and are willing to spend more to get them. Sometimes, stamps are not perforated at all, by accident. This seems to happen often to stamps that you can buy in rolls. Stamps produced in long strips are called "coil" stamps. If you know someone who buys stamps in coils, have them look carefully at them to make sure they all have perforations where they should be.
The best way to tell if you have a stamp that was not perforated is to have at least 2 of them still connected. That way, you are sure that someone didn't just cut off the perfs.
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