The first stamps in Sweden was officially available 1st of July 1855, in a series of five stamps ranging from 3 skilling to 24 skilling.
The standard cost of sending a letter within Sweden was set to 4 (fyra) skilling, after a hefty debate in the spring of 1855, and this stamp was issued in total of 6.6 million stamps, making fairly easy to collect even now. With this high availability of this stamp, it is possible to dig deeper into the printing periods of this stamp, that ranged from july 1855 to february 1858. In all, the experts have identified 21 different nuances of colours, density of the handmade paper and density of the print. These are distributed on 14 different main deliveries from the printer – or 50 different part-deliveries, making it a huge area to cover if you wish to have a complete collection of this stamp.
The other stamps were made to cover different costs of sending letters and packages to other countries, and such combinations of these stamps are both rare and beautiful when they are still attached to the envelope. The 3 skill bco (bco stands for “banco”) was just printed in 91.100 issues, and hence receive a fairly high pricetag in the market. The paper is quite thin, making the stamp quite fragile. It is seldom to find this stamp in a good condition, usually it may have small tears, lacking perforations and so forth. This goes for the other issued stamps as well, even though these were printed on both thin and medium thick paper:
The 6 skill bco printed in 208.500 issues.
The 8 skill bco, this stamp was printed in 718.200 issues.
The 24 skill bco was printed in 174.150 issues, and is quite rare.
We should all be aware of the many forgeries of these stamps, since they have such a high value attached to them. I do recommend only to purchase them if they are certified by an expert. This will give you a good evaluation of the quality of the stamp and will avoid the purchase of a modern (or older) forgery.
