I prefer buying small lots or single items for resale, which is why I rarely have over 1,000 items for sale. This little "ugly duckling" arrived today. It's Trinidad SG18 (1d) Slate-blue, and it looks the worse for wear. In fact it's VFU with four clear margins, as SG comments "(October 1858). Impression less distinct, and rarely showing more than traces of background lines". This is as good as this issue looks, although I'll give it a bath to clear 168 years of dirt and grime. Catalogue value is £850. I paid £75 including postage from an auction site in Sweden

I sit here in hot, sunny, Queensland, listing stamps for sale. On the other side of the planet, a collector in Gibraltar sees one of my listings and buys it. Gibraltar has a population under 40,000, at least one of whom is a stamp collector! My first sale to this destination.

It's been a challenging time at my house, so I've been missing in action. Anything to chat about? @Steve Kennedy and @Jerry Cook are you guys still with us? Love to hear from you

I was sorting KGV heads yesterday. The shade variations on the 1d Violet intrigue me, and I found a dozen stamps that appear to my eye to be different shades. SG, unhelpfully, states "shades", with red-violet as the only shade mentioned separately. BW lists eight shades. I entered this image into chatgpt with the following prompt: "this image shows 12 copies of the same stamp, all with different shade nuances. Using british philatelic descriptions of colour and shade from resources such as stanley gibbons, identify the shade of each stamp (row 1 is numbers 1 to 6, row 2 is numbers 7 to 12)" This is the reply: Fun problem — but I need to start with an important caveat: exact shade attribution from a photographed image is inherently unreliable. Lighting, white balance, camera sensor, screen calibration, and compression all shift colour. Even professional dealers avoid calling precise Gibbons shades from photos unless the image is colour-controlled and compared against a reference chart. So what I can do is: 👉 describe the closest Stanley Gibbons–style shade terminology based on relative comparison within your image, not absolute catalog certainty. These appear to be 1d violet KGV issues (Australia), where Gibbons uses terms like rosine, mauve, aniline rose, dull purple, reddish purple, bright violet, etc. I’m judging by hue temperature (red vs blue bias), saturation, and ink density. 1 - Dull mauve-purple 2 - Rosine-purple 3 - Bright violet 4 - Violet-purple 5 - Rosine 6 - Deep-violet 7 - Pale Dull mauve 8 - Reddish-purple 9 - Dull purple 10 - Bright violet-purple 11 - Aniline rosine 12 - Deep purple It's going to take a lot more research to clarify if chatgpt's answer reconciles with known shade variations, but I think that it's a positive outcome for a first attempt

I price my stamps at a percentage of catalogue value, considering condition etc, plus a little bit. For that reason, I accept offers and hold regular snap sales. It's Australia Day on Monday (26th), so I'm having a 26%-off storewide sale. Pricing needs to allow for this. Listing your items at the lowest price on the internet doesn't take into consideration human psychology. Buyers want sales, and specials, and want to make offers