Farley's Special Printings - Help!

Hi all. I'm retired and have recently revived my childhood interest in stamp collecting. I have a question re the Farley Special Printings of 1933 and 1935. How do you distinguish Scott #s 730(Dearborn) and 731(Federal Building) from Scott #s 766 and 767? For the life of me I cannot see any difference between them, yet there are pages in my album for both sets- #730 & 731 and #766 & 767. Any info will be greatly appreciated. I love this forum!

You need part of the selvage for positive identification. The #766-767 have wide gutters between adjacent panes of 25, and #730-731 do not.

The former are usually collected either in pairs showing this gutter, or singles with an extra-wide selvage. Trimmed singles of both series are indistinguishable from each other. Thank you, Farley!

As pointed out by Doug the only distinguishing feature between the 730/731 and the 766/767 was the gutters. These stamps were printed in 225 subject sheets consisting of 9 panes of 25. The panes were separated by 13mm horizontal and vertical gutters. The 730/731 were cut into panes of 25. Farley presented numerous uncut sheets to friends of the 730/731 (he also presented several other issues as unperforated sheets to friends).

The philatelic community complained about these gifts and the unavailability of these stamps in full unperforated sheets. The congress investigated the matter and directed the Post Office Department to make these unperforated full sheets available to the public. The result was the Farley special printings.

And now we soon will have the 2012 version of Farley's Follies in the form of the limited availability of Uncut Press Sheets for the Major League Baseball issue coming in July 2012.

Thanks to all of you. It seems that without the full sheets, it may be impossible to tell the two printings apart. Oh well!

Thank you for this post. I found it using the search function.

I just used the same ones to fill those spots and stuck in as an extra page, some of my farley's follies.