I Think I Have A Fake 1 Cent Franklin

I think this is a fake the sample on the right, or maybe I (nicely) need

to be schooled on rotary vs. flat press printing. but franklins face is to shushed and skinny.

any thought???

It may just be an illusion due to the cancellation and color.

As stampcrow writes, it just has the appearance of a smushed face - the stamp is normal, the cancel has just made it look odd.

Looks like a ST Paul MN precancel ? No sense in faking a common minimal value stamp.

I've never seen a Franklin that looked like the one on the right. And it isn't just the face that's smushed, the whole stamp is smushed horizontally. Could the one on the right be a photo or is it the actual stamp?


-IBFS

Optical illusion, here is the right hand stamp overlaid upon the left one with some transparency, to my eye they are about the same width.
Don

Hmmm. I'd be curious to see the faces overlaid as shown.


-IBFS

These stamps came out of a box that has been stored since the forties. I dought it was faked with the cancelled. But fake and used as a real stamp. Minnesota is and always has been huge in the printing industry. And this stamp amoung a hand full of good looking ones stick out like a sore thumb.

Like you say it's real, just looks funny

The ink from the cancel makes it appear as if Ben went on some sort of a South Beach diet.
Diane, can you scan each stamp separately at 1200 dpi?

I think we will see that the cancel makes his throat look very skinny

It is not a precancel, it is a box cancel with the screwy vertical box line creating an optical illusion.

Is that a box cancel/roller cancel perhaps? Or, is it a known precancel? Also, commenting about the "squished" look I believe, as previously stated, that it's an optical illusion.

If you want to actually look to identify the rotary vs. flat plate then a good place to start is to look at the reverse of the stamp. If there are ink spots or flecks then it's almost certainly a flat plate printing, as the rotary press used rolls and aren't stacked so no ink transfer to the backs of the sheet on top. Also, you can line up the frame-lines of the design using a template and, depending on the issue, the design of the rotary press issues will be either shorter or more narrow than the flat plate. Read this for examples - http://1847usa.com/washfrank/printingmethods.htm