Is This My First Perfin?

Found this stamp in a box of unsorteds a few hours ago. Looks like LE Co when held justright. Anyone know for sure, and is it common?

Perfins were (are?) used stop people from stealing stamps from companies and other organizations. This certainly looks like a perfin. I don't know what else it could be.

Jack Kelley

Definitely a perfin. It is reversed left to right on the front of the stamp. I can't tell if it is also flipped. The third character in the first grouping of dots(from the back) is a large C with a small O in the center which reads the same right side up or upside down.



ADDED: There is no LE Company listed in the 1979 edition of the US Perfin Catalog/album

I'm not sure of the perfin example either, but there are few curious things about it.

First, the spacing between the left and right side of the perfin on a "commemorative" sized stamp should be the same and visually they are not. Does that mean that it was perfin punched twice? If so, why are there more perfin holes on the left series than the right?

On the right side of the originally scanned stamp, the perfin also has two holes on the lower part of perfin that have not been fulled punched through.

Was this just an old perfin making device that didn't work quite properly? Or could it be double-punched on the one side only? Someone with more perfin expertise than I have maybe able to figure it out.

It appears to be a multipunched "EPC(o)" pattern. E-96A. This pattern shown on a 1907 issue stamp, would make it the "A" pattern used from 1902-1917. The regular E-96 was used from 1917-1926, by the Eagle Pencil Co., New York, NY. The "non-A" version is a "E" rating (common) and the "A version" is a C rating.

I am not sure if the "A" version has been verified as belongng to the Eagle Pencil Company, but one would venture a guess it probably was (might be in one the catalog update pages).
Here is a scan of both.





The double punching (which looks like what occured) tends to make this a challenge to figure out, but one just has to eliminate lines and dots and "poof" there she is. I would also say that if this is the "A" version, the double punching will lower the sale value tremendously.

Hope this helps.

Now back to postal stationery sorting....

Here's a lovely clean struck copy of a Pan Pacific
variety, recently sold on ebay by Bill Weiss...

Reverse



Obverse

Thanks so much for the great info you guys!