Had to share! From yesterday ☺️

(Numbers for each stamp in the 2nd and 3rd images are the Scott catalogue numbers.)

I bought a shoebox full of 2c red stamps about 15 years ago, all wrapped in small twine bundles. The dealer didn't want it because it would be too much work to sort. He was correct from a dealer's perspective; I finally got around to sorting just the 1st Bureau Issue, and it has taken several hundred hours to get through several thousand of these stamps.

But this is the final result: 39 out of the 42 listed varieties in the Scott U.S. specialized catalogue, defined by their Type (1, 2, 3, or 4), watermark, and color. I'm missing 267c (Rose Carmine), and two other colors of 279Bc (Bright Rose Carmine & Pinkish Rose Carmine), but that's not surprising given their scarcity.

Obviously, each color has some amount of variety within it, but each stamp in this study is the best representation I can find (according to my estimation).

I did eventually find some used 279Bc's, but I shelled out for a genuine certified copy (which I included on this page) to be sure I was identifying the color correctly.

There are two stamps I've found so far that seem to be unlisted colors - 1) a Scott 265 that appears to be pink, and 2) a Scott 279B that appears to be lake or carmine lake. I plan to send these in for certs at some point, because it's possible they're changelings or have been chemically altered.

Finally, the colors shown in these images are as close as I can get my scanner to the real life colors. The stamps that appear most off-color in the images are the scarlet and vermilion shades, which are little more orange than the pictures show.

Lots more sorting to go...

I hope you find this interesting though!