1870-1871 American Stamp

Russ- a few weeks back now, there was an interesting thread on VSC in the Experts area, about the #164, and how several of the members have seen #153's with silk fibers over the years. Since Continental was known to have silk paper, Weiss and I think, David Shumaker were going back and forth on this one. Seems that there is a chance that these "silk fibers" may eventually, possibly be certified as #164's.

Anyways, I looked at mine- and hadn't taken it out of the album for a bunch of years, and there were definitely fibers, but there was a lot of gum on the back of the stamp (used stamp with some gum, btw), and so I soaked the gum off and alas....no fibers, so they must have been from some other source.

Have you ever seen a 153 with silk paper?

Ray

Ray, No, never seen a 153 with silk but have seen a few other Continental with silk. The whole 153/164 issue is receiving more attention now. The Stamp Agent at Continental reported 365,000 stamps (24 cent Continental) printed in 1875 and running all the numbers of the National printing vs. quantity issued by post office indicate that about 200,000 were issued. The fact that the only certified 164 is ribbed paper and that the ribbed paper was only used in the last half on 1874 and early 1875 helps to authenticate that Stamp Agents records.

The fact that Continental used the 24 cent National plates means that no secret marks would exist. The color problems experienced in 1870 by National with the purple were well known to both Macdonough and Steele so they would have used an identical ink formulation to prevent this problem on the Continental printings.

Since the plates and ink would be identical the only differentiation would be the paper attributes ie. ribbed or silk fiber.