Well, to follow this up on my original post a year later, a very nice
gentleman forwarded
me scans of the Stanley Gibbons catalogue pages for most of the
Portuguese Colonies I needed. Unfortunately, I had a hard time
converting the Pagemaker files to pdf and, by the time I did, I have
lost contact with him (Hi Chris if you are out there). I am still
missing St. Thomas and Timor, so if anyone has any catalogue pages
that lists these Ceres varieties, I would appreciate a scan copy? In
the meantime, if anyone wants to see my pages with perf varieties for
the 1910-20's era, I have Angola, Azores Mozambique, Mozambique Co,
Macao, Portuguese Guinea and Portuguese India and I will be working on
Cape Verde soon.

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:29:58 -0800 (PST), wrote:

I am trying to make some album pages for the Ceres issues of the

variousPortuguesecolonies. Scott mentions there are different

perforations (e.g. 15 x 14, 12 x 11.5) for these issues, but does not
identify the individual stamps for each perforation. I know the Michel
catalog identifies these issues and I am sure Afinsa does as well, but
my local library does not have these catalogs. Would anyone be able to
supply me with a listing (scanned pages or Excel sheets) for each
colony? I was going to make the pages to supplement William Steiner's
pages from Stampalbums.com. I can forward the finished product if you
can help me.

Tracy Barber:
This is a HUGE task. Between Afinsa, Simoes and the ISPP offered
books, you may be in for a heck of a ride with the Ceres set.

You can probably pick up an Afinsa fairly easily and the ISPP
offerings are sometimes available from the society itself, but the
Simoes catalog has been out of print for decades. I was fortunate to
get a heavily used copy from a fellow in Portugal. It has helped me
out a lot.

"Selos Ceres de Portugal" by Mota / Veira is the closest to the home
country varieties.

Here's some issues with the "sets":

1) Perforation, as you know it. OK, good start.
2) Paper type - yoiks! The plot thickens.
3) Error / printing varieties. The muck and mire set in.
4) The overprints. 6 feet under now...
5) Not enough time in a day / lifetime to do it!


hehehehehehe... On a serious side, now. ThePortugueseand local

administrations were NOTORIOUS for their creating varieties upon
varieties, whether on purpose or out of necessity.

Not all face values have counterparts with different perfs, paper,
print, etc. so it's a turkey shoot as to how to set up the pages.

One way *** may *** be is to have the face value and illustration as
the first item on the page, then create plenty of extra blank boxes
for the variations - each with a line above or below it, so the
collector could write in the various variety. This, of course, is the
brute force method.

Other than that, you will spend an inordinate amount of time
researching the many differences and a lot less time playing with /
looking at the stamps themselves.

Just a thought, is all...
Me:
Hey you didn't mention the positions of the stars...

Anyway, I decided to go halfway between what Michel and Scott offer -
go with the perfs not listed (but mentioned in the set header) in
Scott, but skip the Michel Paper varieties. I was able to knock off
Azores this way, but my friend with the Western Europe Michel moved
away. For some reason, Scott footnotes the Angola Ceres issue with a
list of which values have which perfs, but doesn't do this for any of
the other colonies. So, I have Angola and Azores done, just looking
for the rest. A few colonies don't have perf varieties.


I was going to create a pdf and send it to Bill, if he wanted to list
the pages under Portugal, for any users that want them.

Finally, I just started mounting my Mozambique Company collection and
noticed that the early issues to the 1930's ALL have perforation

varieites, so I suppose I'll seek them out too. Grumble grumble.