A Wiping Error?

Here we have an O10s with what I think a dry printing would look like. By "a dry printing" I'm refering to a sheet of stamp paper that wasn't properly dampened before print. Is that was has occured here?.



<<title change at op's request>>

The 1847 USA site does a nice job explaining wet & dry printing.
http://www.1847usa.com/WetDryPrintingMethods.htm

This particular example looks underinked, that is, too little ink was applied to the plate. Probably the inking vessel ran low.

Wasn't the ink applied with a roller then wiped? Wouldn't the lack of ink have been noticed? If this stamp was in the middle of the sheet of 100, wouldn't the lower part of the sheet have been un-inked impressions?

When did the sheet get overprinted? I don't think it was while the carmine ink was still wet, or the typeset plate would have smudged and blended inks. Those impressions without carmine ink would now get blue SPECIMEN printed on them, before becoming printers waste.

More questions, isn't stamp paper accountable? Wouldn't Continental BNC have to keep some record of how much waste they had in a day?

Phil, that is a remarkable example of a wiping error (scoop printing is actually a wiping problem). You can see how the problem was most intense at the edge of the stamp and tapered off as it got halfway through the design. I have seen blocks that display this sort of thing and I would love to have seen what this stamp looked like in a block.

It is also interesting to see the overprint on top of the weak printing. But what is that going on at the top of the lettering of the overprint? That was a separate operation, so it should not have had any problem. That it seems to have a problem raises a question about just what all is going on with this one. Not sure I can tell from images only.

[Thought I would post this here from the other thread.]

Additional thought prompted by the questions in this thread: the wiping process was done by hand using rags. Sometimes things got a little too vigorous, especially at the edges of the plate, and ink would be taken out from places it was meant to be. But that varied with the skill and attention levels of the operators. However, one of the tipoffs that this was caused by improper hand wiping is the fact that the defect follows a gradient pattern, tapering off in severity the higher up you go.

The problem with the overprint is a separate matter, I think.

Me too, but by the time I had croped and joined two overprint scans, you had beat me to it! So I remeoved that qoute.

I finally asked the right philatelist what caused this error. Thanks essayk!

The overprint may be a kiss print, if so it was quite a kiss! Under the microscope the tops of all the letters are visable, and are thicker than normal. Almost looks doubled. I have a couple more like that.







Here's the link to the Cronicle William E. Mooz piece on doubled overprints.

http://chronicle.uspcs.org/pdf/Chro...86/12049.pdf