Inverted "22" Pm Cancel (Muncie Ind. Jan 17, 1918)

I was just flipping through my covers and realized that I'd missed this the first time through. Any thoughts as to the scarcity of this?

Inverted date / year slugs are pretty common.

On my screen there appear to be some kind of vertical striations cutting into both stamps across the upper fourth of the surface. I don't see it on the cover, just the stamps. What's that about? An artifact from an affixing machine?

Good eye essayk. Another possibility would be from how they were pushed out of a vending machine.

I thought the "22 PM" was kind of interesting too :)







They are definitely on the stamps, not the cover. There's no sign of them on the inside. They also appear to shift where the stamps meet - in other words, it looks like they are aligned with the individual stamps, as opposed to being a single line of them across the two. And the impressions are weaker on the 2c than on the 1c. The tops are about 6mm from the tops of the stamps.

Also, this isn't readily apparent from the images, but the left side of the 2c appears to have been cut, while the other three perforated edges of both stamps look to have been torn by hand, which suggests that they came out of a vending machine.

The most logical presumption would be - the marks are from the gripper roller as the cover traveled through the cancellation machine...

I noticed those too. I like disi's theory AND ray's vending machine. Neat though!

I don't this forum misses anything when it comes to stamps, Awesome job! The depth of the knowledge here is unbelievable! It's like the old saying but backwards, "First you see it then you don"t". But here it's "First I don't see it, but now I do".