Show Your US 1851-57 Imperforate Stamps

Last one for today. This just has to be position 95R4. Has an "engraver slip" at the top of the left frame line.

Hi stampcrow,

ioagoa and I studied the stamp on your Due 3 cover on page 224 of this topic, and plated it to 68L5L.

Your stamp was challenging for us to plate for some very nice reasons, as it is quite a remarkable stamp! It has a sharp impression as you noted in your post, and the color looks nice and fresh as well.

The most remarkable things about the stamp are that it shows good traces of one line recut in the upper-left triangle and one line recut in the lower-right triangle. Neither of these recuts are currently attributed to 68L5L, which was what made it challenging for us.

The orange brown variety, 68L5E, has both triangle recuts attributed to it. However, the recuts at this position appear to have gotten significantly weakened during re-entry, and the two triangle recuts are faint on the late state.

I attached a vertically-compressed image of 68L5E and your 68L5L below, along with a full-size image of 68L5E. In the compressed image, the UL and LR triangle recuts show up as stronger, short vertical dashes in the 68L5E triangles, and once we know where to look, they are readily apparent in the triangles on the 68L5L image.

Chase wrote in the plate 5L comments that when plate 5E was re-entered to become plate 5L, many of the recuts were eradicated to such an extent that any carry-over remnants were not sufficient to be listed as recut varieties on the Late state of the plate--and then he proceeded to list only those where the recuts carried over with sufficient strength--and position 68L5L is not on that list. This is unlike what he did with 2E and 2L -- where he put a small "X" in the photo margin notes for those positions where the recuts carried over (weakly) and then quickly wore away.

CC,

Full disclosure, I went to the plating website, entered 5L, Relief A and triangle recuts 11 + 17. When I didn't see a match I tucked the cover back into its home.
Your skill and will never cease to amaze. I can see 68L5L is correct.

So, looking at 68L5L, I thinks its interesting that my example has all four triangles, to my eyes, that match closely to the Early Plate examples but not the Late.
But the LOFL is a match to the Late Plate examples on both the StampPlating and StampSmarter sites and not the Early. Do you think certain inks and or other factors can create crisper examples including showing recuts?

Chase notes 5L first being used in Sep, 1855. That says to me.., June 1856 68L5L for my example because by June of 1857 it would've been perforated?

Thanks CC and Ioagoa.

Hi stampcrow,

I appreciate your kind feedback.

Plate wear, ink quality, paper quality, and wiping can all factor into clarity of impression and the ability to see faint recuts. It has been said in this forum that a higher quality of paper was used for a time within the last two years of production of the 3-cent imperforates, and that this higher-quality paper had more to do with some of the clearer 1856-57 impressions than it generally is given credit for. I've shown some remarkably clear impressions on 1856 yellowish rose reds in this thread, and I think the combination of ink and paper quality can be credited for this clarity.

Do you know what color the stamp is on your Due 3 cover?

Hah, do I ever 'know' what color a stamp is?!
On a serious note.., thanks to your help some time ago I do have some examples of Orange Red, YRR and Rose Red identified in my collection.

To my eyes the stamp on the Due 3 cover is a bright version of YRR. If there is such a shade?
Obviously my observations are not definitive.

The yellowish rose reds are a difficult group to classify. In Chronicle 206, W. Wilson Hulme II and Dr. Wilbur F. Amonette wrote of the difficulty in separating all the YRR variations, so they settled on two classifications of paler and yellower shades and medium and deep shades, and they didn't declare a "bright" variety.

Below are three from my collection. I classify the left one as YRR/medium and deep, and the middle one as YRR/pale and yellowish. The third one was classified by another color specialist as YRR/deep, although I don't see anything yellowish about it.

I have some YRRs similar to the first one that look a little pinkish, which make sense since Hulme and Amonette said the rare pinkish color is probably a variation of YRR.

Classic, for that plate 4 pair...

Is it 39L4 and 40L4? If not, then I am stumped. If so, then the color image of 39L4 must be wrong. The reason it is wrong is because 40L4 should be positioned higher than 39L4 as shown on my pair.

Is the bottom right corner a joined label and diamond block? Is it a guide dot? Is it just an inking anomaly?

If a guide dot, does it make this 29R2L?



Here is a close up:

Hi, NicholasC,

Your 29R2L is correctly plated, and it has a large guide dot that connects or nearly connects the lower label block to the LR diamond block. Since it is a guide dot rather than a recut line, I don't believe this would get classified as a connect variety.

This one appears to be 84R3.

Characteristics I see are relief B and 1 recut in upper left triangle and 1 recut in lower left triangle. Apparently, there is a guide dot right on the frame line at lower right. On my stamp, it is hard to distinguish.

The 38L4, 39L4, and 40L4 (strip of 3) images on stampplating.com are incorrectly plated. The three stamps shown are actually 52L4, 53L4, and 54L4. The website owner is aware of this.

Edited to say the website owner is aware.

Hi Classic, thank you once again. I'll take that confirmation of the incorrect images to mean that my pair is indeed 39L4 and 40L4. Also, thanks for checking on that 29R2L.

Hi, NicholasC,

I didn't confirm the pair is 39L4 and 40L4.

Oops, I jumped the gun. I'll give them another look over. Those will likely be my last 3c imperforates for a while. I have many others, but they don't have any distinguishing features to make identification less than extremely difficult and time consuming.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying they're not 39L4 and 40L4. They look like they probably are. I just didn't go through the whole plate to confirm this.