Digging through Peru

Last year was a bumper year for me and stamp collecting. I managed to acquire some 80 different lots from three or four different dealers. Some of these were huge - 40 pounds or more in weight. I've been working all winter trying to get them organized and sorted down. About 2/3 of it is now on manila stock pages or in packages sorted down by country. I've slowly been trying to work up each country - sorting down what I have, adding what I needed to my collection, preparing the rest either for my trade stock or dumping it into my "recycle bin" - a 30-gallon rubber trash can - to be given to the Boy Scouts, the VA Hospital, or sold to buy more stamps.

I started sorting what I had on hand for Peru Saturday evening. Peru is one of the few countries that never used watermarked paper for its stamps. However, it's still a mess to sort down, since they DID use as many as five different printers for a particular design or series of stamps. The stamps of Peru, however, are great for learning from.

If you've ever wondered what the "grill" on the backs of some early US stamps looks like, the best examples can be found on the 1874-84 "sun" issue of Peru. The grill is similar to the "E" grill found on US stamps from 1867-1880. While the US stamps are priced in the multiple-dollar range (many in the hundreds or thousands of dollars), the grilled stamps of Peru sell for $.25 to $2.50 each, and the whole set is catalogued at $25 mint and $8 used.

From 1938 through 1951, a set of ten definitive stamps were issued four times, printed by three different companies in three different printing methods. The first issue was printed by Waterlow & Sons in 1938, and were printed by photogravure. The second issue was printed by the Columbian Bank Note Co in 1945-47, and were lithographed. Waterlow & Sons printed the third issue in 1949-51, in changed colors from the first issue. Four stamps were reissued in 1951 by the Institute de Gravure in Paris, and are, as indiciated by the printer, engraved. The government did much the same thing with the "Scenes of Peru" issues from 1952 through 1968. Again, there were five different sets issued by three different printers, but this time the stamps were all lithographed.

Peru has also been a country that used its excess printings of stamps by overprinting (and sometimes surcharging) them. There are literally hundreds of different overprinted issues. There are frequently varieties to these overprints that can be quite valuable, and equally hard to find. I've never found one in 45 years of collecting.

Altogether, I think I ended up with about 540 different varieties I need to catalogue and see what I'm missing in my collection. The majority of the rest will go into my trade stock. I hope to have a want/have list posted to my stamp website by the end of this month.