Penny Browns

Hi to all

I have been told that the corner letters on these stamps identify the place in the plate and that the numerals down the side, which you have to find with an eye glass tell you which plate they are from. Some have asterisks in the top corners, and others have all numerals in all corners.
Is there a work that I can consult that will actually tell you the values. I have another one which I forgot to scan which has the letter H in all four corners. Does this make it more valuable than the others?
Regards
Horamkhet

These are Penny Reds although as you see these are an unusual shade of red.
The ink of the day and the fact these are 150+ years old though goes some way to explaining it.

The ones with on letters in the bottom position are earlier varieties. The ones with all four letters should have plate information printed in the left and righ borders.
There have been a few post recently regarding this which you might want to search for.
Theoretically each plate had an equal range of letters -

AA AB AC AD AE AF AG AH AI AJ AK AL
BA BB BC BD BE BF BG BH BI BJ BK BL etc.

so HH shouldn't have a premium but sometimes the double letters do.
The site http://pennystars.com/ is a good place to start.

The letters in the corners tell you the position on the plate of 240 stamps.

The first stamp in the upper left has the letters AA and it goes to AT
Then the next horizontal row starts BA and goes to BT. This continues with the C row, the D row and so on. This goes to the L row and the last row goes from LA to LT.

The letters at the bottom of the stamp are the ones which do this. The letters in the top corners just reverse the letters in the bottom corners.

The letters alone do not tell you which plate the stamp comes from. If you have the Penny Red (Brown as you call it, but they are called Penny Reds) with the letters in all four corners, the plate number is found in the scroll work on either side of the Queen's portrait. So these are easy to plate.

If you have the Penny Red with the letters only in the bottom corners, you have an entirely different problem. There are subtle differences between various stamps which may (MAY) allow you to assign a plate number.

I am certainly no expert on assigning plate numbers, although I have gotten lucky on occasion and using the Stanley Gibbons specialized Queen Victoria volume been able to plate an individual stamp.

I am sure that there are volumes of specialized works which go into plating in great detail. Perhaps someone here on the forum can point you to some of those. Also try some British stamp sites or groups.

Hope this gets you started in the right direction.

Thanks for all the imformation.

It is very helpful.
Regards,
Horamakhet

This was one of the posts

https://goscf.com/t/11245

There is a full listing of the plates used for the Penny Red in any Stanley Gibbons specialised catalogue covering Great Britain. The plate numbers always should be read from the side of the portrait, ie on the left of the stamp the numbers are read from bottom to top, while the numbers on the right hand side of the stamp are read from top to bottom.
This shows plate 143 on the right hand side:


As usual, wikipedia has a useful summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Red.

I haven't been able to track down an on line listing of the plates and values, though there must be one out there somewhere. There's a fairly comprehensive commercial site at
http://www.pennystars.com/
(according to this site, over 21 billion were issued). The site also lists a huge number of further varieties.

This link has images and prices for some plates:

http://www.stampcollectingvalues.in...y-red-plate/