White Plains S/S #630, Trimmed Margins Or Not?

Hi, this is a great forum! I just bought the White Plains s/s from ebay. See attached image. I'm wondering if the top and left margins have been trimmed. The s/s looks a bit uneven, just slightly, and there are only 13 perf holes on the top and left margin. Similar sheets seem to have between 14 -16.



The top and left margin are a tad less than 1 inch each. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Brian

It doesn't look like it, but the upper left corner looks snipped. That is an awesome SS you have there!

It does not look trimmed to me.

Hi, thanks. Yeah, I like the sheet. The upper right corner is snipped on all sheets of this configuration. But this snip looks a tad smaller than other sheets. I guess it probably doesn't matter too much, but it's always nice to know about these things as there is so little info out there on this. Even google searches pull up little info. I've wanted this sheet since I was 8. Finally got it 30 and some odd years later.The angle of the corners aren't exactly 90 degrees either, it's a tad trapazoid. I mean most people won't notice, but I have a pixel perfect eye, so I notice these things. Thanks everyone for any info.

Hey, heybrian. Welcome to SCF!

There may not be much information "out there" but a search of this forum for "White Plains" turns up 5 pages of results.

Here is a post that khj made providing information on marginal measurements:

https://goscf.com/t/13652&whichpage=2#122075

This is the plate layout.

Oh, very cool plate. Stamp collecting is fun, but it's just frustrating how much funny business goes along with it in trying to fix things. You really need to have an eye for detail and after several bad ebay sales, I'm skeptical of everything. I think I'll buy the Scott guide to learn more about everything.

Since your pane appears to be from the upper top left position, there should be more margin selvage on the upper top and left sides than on the lower bottom and right sides because these two sides were connected to other panes on the sheet and had to be cut from the others there. Thus, the narrower margins should be on the two inner sides that were connected to the full sheet while the wider margins were not connected but were the outer outside ones.

I saw them trimmed and cut many different ways at many different prices when I was hunting for mine. It seemed to me irrelevant of how the pricing was, according to how it was cut, with one exception. heybrian's scan is the type cut that drew the higher premiums. The one I bought was maybe 1/3 less. Here is a (bad) scan of the one I got and I'm darned proud of it.




-IBFS

I notice that heybrian's sheet and mine are from the same plate. I wonder how many plates there were. If anyone has better eyes than me, can someone tell what the plate number was on the scan of that plate layout?


-IBFS

18770
18771
18773
18774

It's strange how many variations there are. For the upper left sheet, in the left and top margins, I've counted anywhere between 12 to 16 perforation holes per row. I would have thought they would all be standardized at, say, 14. It seems either they were standardized, and many sheets have been trimmed, or that the printer was quick and shifted paper or the plate around. The history is interesting. I wonder who really even knows this stuff.

From what I have seen, there is a fair amount of variation in how they were cut. If you want to see a huge herd of them all in one auction, there are something like 50 of them in the Harmer-Schau auction this month that you can compare to (pictures are on their web site www.harmerschau.com - lots 1796 to 1846).