Scott 3793 Presort First Class Stamp - Background Color

I received a piece of junk mail containing this stamp (Scott 3793). I have neither soaked it nor removed it from the envelope paper. However, it looks a bit odd in that the gold background appears to be compromised by some tones of black or gray in the upper part of the stamp. Is this normal?



The Scott catalog does not reference any color varieties with this issue, but since the date is in black, certainly black was used in the printing process and I wonder if somehow the background color could have been contaminated.

wt1, that is a design element. It occurrs on all of the issues, the upper left corner for colored eagles on gold backgrounds, and lower right corner for gold eagles on colorede backgrounds.

Thanks. Still trying to acquire all of the various color combinations of this complicated issue.

Here are a few examples to illustrate Wil Bobbin's point regarding the shading:

Thanks. Seems kind of odd that they would do such shading, but maybe it had something to do with anti-counterfeiting techniques before microprinting started to appear.

i have some of this issue wt1...if you are interested.