Two hour interview with.... Bill Mastro

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Balticfox

What's also interesting is stamp collecting started way back in the 1840's which is far earlier than trade card or comic collecting. Are there any stamp collectors on this board who can tell us what can be done to stamps without raising hackles/alarm bells?

That's a semi contentious area there too.
Especially after grading came along.

The answer will vary depending on the issue.
One set from Germany had acidic gum, and it's expected and almost required that it be removed by soaking.
For a long time unused US stamps that were precancelled for bulk mailers were not allowed to be sold to collectors, but of course were sold by a few different places, the minimum required to be a permit holder for a smaller town was an expected 500 mail pieces.
Most of the dealers could get their hands on thousands at a time, and soaked the gum off to sort of cover up their purchases.

Most yellow or orange stamps oxidize to orange or brown, and a lot of people will reverse this by a quick dip in hydrogen peroxide. I don't, most of the stamps it happens to are inexpensive, and nice ones are easily found.

Things like extra long bits between perforations and routinely shortened, doing that by pulling with a tweezers is generally ok, cutting with an exacto knife isn't. Again, if something is the minimum catalog value of 25 cents like nearly every stamp since the 30's it isn't usually done.

For used stamps, soaking to remove paper and envelope bits is generally ok , In some cases the piece it's on and the cancel showing can be worth a lot more than the stamp so caution is needed.
A stamp with a lot of dirt also often gets soaked.

The grading companies do give very high grades to stamps issued without perforations cut from blocks so you get a stamp with eight others showing in the margins, I don't think that's at all good, but it seems to have become mostly ok. Sort of like trimming a hand cut card like Hostess.


Anything else does happen, and is NOT ok. The degree varies as does how it affects the price.

Removing the perforated border,
adding a perforated border
repairing tears
Painting in details a stamp never had so it seems like a more expensive version.
Fixing thin spots
washing out cancels
adding fake cancels
Faking overprints
Obscuring overprints
Chemically altering the color
rebuilding or adding back damaged areas
Putting on new gum
redistributing the original gum

The expertizers are very good at catching that stuff, and are typically experts in a fairly narrow field.

All that can lead to interesting situations.
Here's a stamp I sent in via a friend.
The first foreign entry of it's kind to be expertized.
But with a fake cancel.
At some point, a used O6 was an easier thing to sell, or higher priced than one that was unused with no gum.
I only know of 6-7 examples of that foreign entry.

Rare, but a bit messed up.