Inverted Old Germany Stamp???

I think I may have found my very 1st inverted stamp
Germany 1924 Scott #330
What do you think?? Is it inverted?
The writing on the cancel is right but the number is upsides down?

Hi,
the cancel is upside down. You would realize this seeing the complete cancel. The top part is "below" the stamp.

wouldnt the writng (Frank) as well be upside down then? Oh well I had my hopes up here hahaha

A single stamp cannot possibly be inverted! A stamp is described as inverted if a single cliche in a printing plate is put in upside down. Then one of the stamps in the sheet will be the opposite way up compared to the rest. If you then get two stamps joined together, one of which is the opposite way up to the other, you have what is called a tete beche pair - one is inverted, though there is no way of telling which (you can tell for sure if you have a strip or block of three or more).

A stamp is not inverted just for being stuck upside down on an envelope - which may have happened here, but probably a postal clerk just held the handstamp upside down.

I imagine the words beginning 'Frank' are a long slogan going all the way round; and as heinz said, you are only looking at the bottom half of the cancel, looking at the beginning of the first and end of the last words.

The first stamp of this pair is inverted (or the second, according to taste!)



but as Bamra1 says, if you separated them, you'd never know it was inverted.

@Tony - Were those stamps not issued tete beche, then?

@UFOAIRMAIL - One possibility for an inverted stamp is if the watermark is inverted.

I'm no expert but I don't think any of those are inverted. This is what I would call an inverted overprint. I have around 7 of them.

I have seen some inverted cancellation myself and was confused these are things you have to pay close attention to

Very interesting and informative
thank you!

Smauggie, one cliché in the sheet was inverted when the sheet was put together for surcharging, but the underlying stamp never appeared with the inverted cliché.

The printers 'solved' the problem, not by reversing the cliché but

Thank you for the education, Tony.

Another old favourite from Charkhari:



You can teach almost any philatelic lesson from the Indian States

That's an entirely different thing. Inverted watermarks are caused by the 'way up' that paper is fed into the printing machine. If a sheet is fed in the 'wrong way' the watermark is inverted on ALL the stamps on the sheet.

However 'the wrong way' is not a scientific term here. For some issues all the sheets get fed in the 'wrong way'(as far as the design is concerned) and the scarcity would be for stamps from an odd sheet that went through 'the right way up'.

In some cases they were put through with absolutely no regard for direction - up, down, left. right, and the same combinations back to front. I'm guessing that within 5 minutes of this post tonymacg will put up a complete set of watermarks on the definitives of Travancore, which is a very good case in point.

Also I don't want to give the impression that most tete beche pairs are caused by a single cliche being inverted in error. They aren't. Most are caused deliberately as part of the printing process e.g.:

The printer is too small to print a full sheet in one go. Print half, turn the paper round and print the other half. Where the two halves meet in the middle there will be a full row of tetes beches.

Or you are making stamp booklets. You need short rows of stamps with a margin at the left to staple the booklet through. If you print the right half of the sheet upside down, when you separate down the middle and turn the right half the other way up you have an exact copy of the first half, with the original right margin now on the left. All well and good, but if one of these sheets doesn't get separated you have a vertical column of tetes beches right down the middle. Used to happen a lot in Switzerland where they would print a lot of sheets like this, take out enough for the booklets they needed, and then handed over the rest to post offices for normal use.

Also I don't want to give the impression that most tete beche pairs are caused by a single cliche being inverted in error. They aren't. Most are caused deliberately as part of the printing process e.g.:

The printer is too small to print a full sheet in one go. Print half, turn the paper round and print the other half. Where the two halves meet in the middle there will be a full row of tetes beches.

Or you are making stamp booklets. You need short rows of stamps with a margin at the left to staple the booklet through. If you print the right half of the sheet upside down, when you separate down the middle and turn the right half the other way up you have an exact copy of the first half, with the original right margin now on the left. All well and good, but if one of these sheets doesn't get separated you have a vertical column of tetes beches right down the middle. Used to happen a lot in Switzerland where they would print a lot of sheets like this, take out enough for the booklets they needed, and then handed over the rest to post offices for normal use.