Test Your EFO Knowledge: Quiz Answers

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How did you do in the quiz, EFO students?

It is not only during the printing and perforating processes that EFOs are created. EFOs can be created even after the stamp has been applied to an envelope and the envelope has been put into the mailstream. Case in point: The cancels on all the items above have issues.

On the top two items, the year in the circular date stamp is inverted.

The item at the bottom has en even funnier error: Take a look at the date: It is November 33^rd. The person who set the date on the canceling device must have been elsewhere in his thoughts...

The story featuring these stamps appeared in the July-September 2015 issue of The EFO Collector.

September 3^rd, 2025

If you look carefully, all the stamps shown are priceless... i.e., they are missing their denominations. How can that happen?

The missing denomination can be due to several reasons:

The stamp shown above on the left is a simple misperf, perhaps the most common reason of a missing denomination. Here are some more examples:

Multicolor stamps printed on older flat presses have to go several times through the press. If a sheet of stamps skips of those passes, say, because it temporarily stuck to the sheet preceding it, then the color is missing.

For example, the stamp below on the left is missing the denomination as well as the country name. The normal one is shown on the right. Even though the country name and the denomination are in black and the design of the stamp has other elements in black, the explanation here is that the two black colors were printed in different passes, and one is missing. This is referred to as omitted color.

A color may not be present because of a color shift. On the stamp below on the left, the white color has shifted to the right. You can see this better if you compare it to the normal one on the right. This is referred to as a color shift or as a missing color.

One other reason for a missing denomination can be that the press simply ran out of ink. This is the case in the example shown below. You can see this because the partial printing on the left. One would expect that printing becomes fainter as additional copies are printed. We should note that these cases are not referred to as color omitted, unless there is absolutely no trace of the color. This is rarely the case. In general, you can see traces of the color when looking at such stamps under 30x magnification.