Washington 1915 2c With Horizontal Perf Holes Not Aligned Straight.

The horizontal perf holes are not on a straight line. Normally perfs are on a straight line,I guess. Won't such unaligned perfs tilt the image/stamp. Will appreciate your opinions if this is a norm or error. Thank you.

They look pretty straight to me. Sure, one or two holes are slightly out of line with the others, but that's fairly normal for that era of stamps.

Have you purchased or checked out a stamp catalog yet? Lots of nice information in those books.

Normal flat plate perfs for the period.

Each wheel of perforation were set individually and thus the distance between rows or columns can vary and is normal if set to fall between the stamps.



No, the printed stamp image and the perforation are added independently of the other process.

Also for US Stamps here is a discussion of what an error is as a term of art in USA philately: https://www.efocc.org/Resources/Hot...ntFormat.php


You profile indicates you have collected for 40 years. Do you have any stamp catalogs and if so which one or ones? Partime has a point.

Edited to add: I have been offering a free US Specialized Catalog with only the cost of shipping being paid by the recipient. Alas postage to Malaysia for such a book is very expensive from the USA. Well over $20 in postage up to over $100 depending on class of mail used.

@asi : You have used a cheap cellphone camera to take this picture. The image is not only out of focus, it is more or less badly distorted due to the single lens used in your camera. If you take your picture and draw straight lines in a graphics program, you'll see nothing fits (the stamp at bottom is considerably wider than the stamp on top, for example).

Such poor images make it difficult to discuss delicate points made by observing a distorted image. Take a picture with a scanner. Not only will the image be in focus, it will also not suffer from bad lens distortion.

Your stamps were perforated at the BEP (Bureau of Engraving and Printing) using a line perforator. On a single line perforator, the printed sheet is fed into the perforator twice, once in each direction (the sheet was rotated by 90 degrees after the first pass). The perforator mechanism was a drum where the manufacturer mounted wheels with sharp pins. On a two-way perforator, both vertical and horizontal drums were mounted inside the same machine so the sheets passed the perforator only once.

The number of pins on a wheel and the number of wheels per drum was factory ordered by the BEP. In theory, all pin wheels would be identically mounted with identical gaps in between so you'd get perforations which are perfectly aligned, vertically and horizontally on each sheet.In reality, slight manufacturing tolerances and some happenstance while perforating gazillions of sheets could change individual pin settings. In case of a defect, like broken pins, badly bent/misaligned pin(s) (due to pin(s) failing to hit the counter drum wheels that had holes in it), the BEP would send the drum back to the manufacturer for repairs.

As a result, distances between perf holes as well as minor misalignments are not uncommon on those stamps.
Now, in your image, the middle horizontal row of perfs seems to be shifted to the side compared to the top and bottom row. I don't know if that is a common occurence or not. On a single line perforator that should mean somewhere there is an equally strong misalignment in the vertical perf hole distance between two holes but I have to think about that one....

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