Surcharge Errors of 1899-1904
Between 1899 and 1904 the United Sates Postal Service surcharged existing U.S. postage stamps for use in the Philippines. All stamps were surcharged with the word “PHILIPPINES” printed at an angle but with no change to the value of the stamps. Printing errors are fairly common on these releases, due mostly to irregular plate inking, dust/lint on the plate/paper or simply due to plate wear. Palmer clearly calls these out as not being errors in his 1912 book “The Postal Issues of the Philippines”.
…there is another class of so called “errors” which are not such in the true sense. These consist of various readings of the PHILIPPINES over-print caused by defective printing or, as the plates became worn, due to injury to certain letters.
While these “varieties” are interesting in themselves, they are regarded as mere “curios” and not true errors, and hence not separately listed.
“The Postal Issues of the Philippines”, 1912 – F.L. Palmer
The over-printed “PHILIPPINES” is often seen missing a small part of individual letter – or worse still a letter in its entirety. Offsets errors can also be witnessed (where the over-print crosses the boundary of 2 stamps). Some interesting errors occur where parts of letters failed to print and the result is a different character being printed altogether. For example, if the middle bar of a “H” failed to print it would result in what looks like two letter “I”‘s. Some interesting over-prints that I’ve seen are “IHILIPPINES”, “FHILIPPINES”, “PHIL PPINES”, “PLILIPPINES”, “PRILIPPINES”, “PEILIPPINES” and “HILIPPINES” instead of “PHILIPPINES”.
It can be easy to miss these errors on visual inspection as they are often masked by cancellations or can simply be difficult to see with the naked eye. I have many, many more examples of the 1903 green 1c Washington stamp but didn’t see much value in adding them all here as there are many minor variations.
I will not get into a debate on whether these are “real errors” or not but my interest has been sparked and I now look more closely at stamps of this generation whenever they cross my path.