After a few minutes of study, I cannot find any other deviations in the engraving of the forgeries. This would lead me to conclude that they are reprints from the original dies.
From study of other forged issues, it's inconceivable that a forger could reproduce an engraving that perfectly.
According to Varro Tyler, reprints of this issue do not exist. He states that some of the counterfeits were made by the printers of the original issue, Gundman & Stangel in Athens, but the counterfeits were not printed from the original stone. The counterfeits were sold by Francois Fournier in Geneva.
The genuine stamps are perforated 11.5. It is believed that Fournier also printed the counterfeits, and perforated them 11. Other counterfeits can be found perfed 11.25. The original Athens forgeries are perfed 11.5 as the originals.
Michael is correct; these stamps were not reprinted.
Even the first forgeries consistently show the incomplete circle.
The original stamps were printed in sheets of 100 made up of repeated blocks (transfers) of ten stamps.
Any genuine stamp can be identified in terms of its position in a transfer by checking for tiny flaws in the design.
These design flaws do not appear in the forgeries.
For example, here the original stamp at the left shows a characteristic white flaw in the design towards the top right. This was repeated ten times in each sheet of the 10 parades blue.
Oh, I see it now. It's a break in the inner frame line. Don't know how I missed that.
Also looks like the 'crack' extends outwards, involving both the dentition and outer frame line.
Most of the design flaws that I mentioned are quite hard to spot without a reference diagram and there is one position on the transfer of the 10 parades blue that doesn't appear to have any flaws.
Here's another example.
The transfer unit for the 10 parades blue consisted of ten stamps, two across and five down like this:
and here are three stamps from the bottom row of this transfer:
The stamp at the left is conventionally identified as position 9 in the transfer and has the same characteristics as the stamp on the right (which is in position 9 in the adjacent transfer block).
The identifying flaw for position 9 is a tiny dot on the bottom of the inside frame line above the greek key pattern:
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Zooming in further, it's in the middle of this scan:
The middle stamp (position 10) has a more interesting feature as the small circle is missing:
The other values/colours of stamps in this design each have their own transfer characteristics and there are still some details to be worked out.
Man, that "tiny dot" on the position 9 stamp is the quintessential "fly speck"!
The Pony Express private issue stamps are really fun and interesting to plate. There are LOTS of major differences between the various positions. Sometimes, I'll surf them on eBay just for the fun and challenge of plating them. Is also a good way to practice rooting out forgeries.
Cool that you're engaged in sorting all those difference out.
Thanks!
-Paul
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May be Greek...not sure..any help would be appreciated
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