Optical Illusion ?

Sorting Pre cancels tonight since it's raining and I was about to toss this one onto the bin when something weird caught my eye....

Poughkeepsie NY, a town about halfway between NYC and Albany on the Hudson River.

Poughkeepsie, NY was a reasonably heavy user of precancels back in the day, although your example seems to give evidence to some sort of debris affecting the clean imprint of the town name. Here's a somewhat better example of what the precancel should look like:

I think Mr. stallzer is referring
to HEW YORK.

I thought he was referring to the fact that it appears that Washington's hat seems to be IN FRONT of the word Poughkipsie. Anyway, that's the first thing I saw.

First thing I saw too. It looks most odd. Any chance of a close-up of the 'Hat' area.
I only noticed the 'hew' after it was mentioned by alanl...also looks odd.

An odd stamp, one might say.

Londonbus1

Bingo ! I'm not sure what to make out of it.

A faulty precancel on a faulty stamp.

In this case, it is an inking problem that occurs occasionally. Ink will vary from batch to batch, and sometimes the ink will not wet/adhere well when it has to cross a series of thin lines on engraved stamps. Sometimes it flakes off. Sometimes the raised stamp ink keeps the cancel from wetting/adhering to the thin "white area". If you look at stallzer's stamp, the phenomena occurs with the horizontal bars as well, not just the city name.

On modern US stamps, I've seen the opposite. The cancel ink doesn't adhere to some stamp inks. One example is the 29c pine cone self-adhesive.

Hi,
know this topic is a few months old but I just wanted to comment, It looks brilliant. 3d hat is very cool,
Turbo