


Good deal! I too collect these multi-faceted monsters and have plenty of work to do with them. Watch out for line and comb perfs as well as the perfs themselves. And that darn gum that won't come off them! 
Tracy
I have an extensive Austrian collection and in that series in particular I have many stamps, some as many as six varietys of perf. I only lack 5 stamps to consider these sets complete.



Whenever you are done and if you have any of the stamps I miss please, let me know, let's do some trades.
Great topic, my Grandfather was one of Franz Josephs mountain troops. Although ethnic Italians my family had Austrian passports.
Stampcollector:
I would be cautious about stating these are complete. There are perforation, gum, varnish bars and other sordid things on these stamps. I am dreading going through mine because of all of the possibilities. I use Michel, Netto and Scott catalogs to confirm the differences and there are soooo many.
Your grouping looks nice, however. I like it when I can get piles of these because you can never be sure what you're getting. I mean that in a good way, because many people do not spend the time on checking for varieties. The last batch I bought was divided between varnish / no varnish and the perfs. I still didn't keep those in mind when cleaning them because they could be wrong.
The perfs are time consuming because some can be compound all around the stamp. It seems their perforators were mixed and matched or broken down and replaced with spare parts. Also, sometimes it's tough to detect the varnish bars. Even those have different widths in mm and that's pretty small to work with, unless you have a microscope. I have an older Intel one that needs to be updated to a new one before I start playing that deeply.
The Austrians were so worried about re-using the stamps it's maddening. Even the leaf revenues are horrific!
Anyway, my album is printed but my spare pages not put in places they need to go. Using the stamp specs for the least expensive / common item will go on the first page, then the varieties next on plain pages and notations about them.
One can spend a lot of time on these, similar to my creating a database of Belgian railroad stamps by railroad depot. I have at least 1700 different depots so far and these are only the chamfer cancels! So, trying to collect Josef issues by per / varnish and then by different towns is completely off the rails. Heh!
Well, have fun with these. It is interesting to pick up a favorite like these and work on them.
Have a great day! Tracy
Stampcollector:
Oops! I forgot about those hard to find inverted numbers on the Franz Josef stamps. Sheesh... Color varieties also? 
Tracy
I collect worldwide blocks of 4, and I have two of these stamps as block examples in my collection. Shown below is Scott #86a with "varnish bars." I did not even know what "varnish bars" were until I acquired this block a few years ago. In the second scan, I used my Windows 11 Photos Editor software to tweak the light adjustment settings way out to enhance the varnish bars on this same block. Perhaps some of you will also learn what varnish bars are, from this example, if you were like me and did not know.
The third scan is my other Austria block, Scott #77, this one without varnish bars.
From reading this thread, it looks like I should measure the perforations and make new labels with this information.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge,
Linus



Thanks to the thoughtfulness of a fellow early Austria collector, I recently took possession of a stockbook filled with Franz Josef issues running from 1890 to 1904. The stockbook also includes a smattering of the 1883 Coat of Arms issues as well as the 1867 and 1874 course and fine portraits.
The quality of the material is clean as well as very good overall. Great variety in postmarks, shades, etc.
Obtaining a large stock of said material is rewarding in and of itself. Yet the icing on the cake was discovering the prior owner segregated nearly all of the FJ issues by perforation type and size!
Once I process this material plan to share the surplus with fellow collectors.

re: Austria: Frank Josef issues
Good deal! I too collect these multi-faceted monsters and have plenty of work to do with them. Watch out for line and comb perfs as well as the perfs themselves. And that darn gum that won't come off them! 
Tracy

re: Austria: Frank Josef issues
I have an extensive Austrian collection and in that series in particular I have many stamps, some as many as six varietys of perf. I only lack 5 stamps to consider these sets complete.



Whenever you are done and if you have any of the stamps I miss please, let me know, let's do some trades.

re: Austria: Frank Josef issues
Great topic, my Grandfather was one of Franz Josephs mountain troops. Although ethnic Italians my family had Austrian passports.

re: Austria: Frank Josef issues
Stampcollector:
I would be cautious about stating these are complete. There are perforation, gum, varnish bars and other sordid things on these stamps. I am dreading going through mine because of all of the possibilities. I use Michel, Netto and Scott catalogs to confirm the differences and there are soooo many.
Your grouping looks nice, however. I like it when I can get piles of these because you can never be sure what you're getting. I mean that in a good way, because many people do not spend the time on checking for varieties. The last batch I bought was divided between varnish / no varnish and the perfs. I still didn't keep those in mind when cleaning them because they could be wrong.
The perfs are time consuming because some can be compound all around the stamp. It seems their perforators were mixed and matched or broken down and replaced with spare parts. Also, sometimes it's tough to detect the varnish bars. Even those have different widths in mm and that's pretty small to work with, unless you have a microscope. I have an older Intel one that needs to be updated to a new one before I start playing that deeply.
The Austrians were so worried about re-using the stamps it's maddening. Even the leaf revenues are horrific!
Anyway, my album is printed but my spare pages not put in places they need to go. Using the stamp specs for the least expensive / common item will go on the first page, then the varieties next on plain pages and notations about them.
One can spend a lot of time on these, similar to my creating a database of Belgian railroad stamps by railroad depot. I have at least 1700 different depots so far and these are only the chamfer cancels! So, trying to collect Josef issues by per / varnish and then by different towns is completely off the rails. Heh!
Well, have fun with these. It is interesting to pick up a favorite like these and work on them.
Have a great day! Tracy

re: Austria: Frank Josef issues
Stampcollector:
Oops! I forgot about those hard to find inverted numbers on the Franz Josef stamps. Sheesh... Color varieties also? 
Tracy

re: Austria: Frank Josef issues
I collect worldwide blocks of 4, and I have two of these stamps as block examples in my collection. Shown below is Scott #86a with "varnish bars." I did not even know what "varnish bars" were until I acquired this block a few years ago. In the second scan, I used my Windows 11 Photos Editor software to tweak the light adjustment settings way out to enhance the varnish bars on this same block. Perhaps some of you will also learn what varnish bars are, from this example, if you were like me and did not know.
The third scan is my other Austria block, Scott #77, this one without varnish bars.
From reading this thread, it looks like I should measure the perforations and make new labels with this information.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge,
Linus


