US 231 Broken Hat And Other Varieties

OK, some examples. Most are pretty subtle differences, but I'm trying my best. First a "normal" stamp with a normal hat:





Now, the very early stage or start of a break:



Which could get worse, and turn into a very dull or rounded break, or maybe into a sharper break:





Which, of course, can get worse. Maybe into this "shadowed" version:



Which can then get deeper, and maybe wider:





And, finally, one I think shows that part of the hat gets a little crumpled:



(I wish I had a better scanner ...)

Very nice thread. I've got lots of these also...now i'll have to go blind looking thru the loupe. I want a document camera in the worst way...*L*

I think you can find some kind of flaw on every one of these Stamps.

This one has a dot above the "C" in Columbus and some missing ink spots on the right numeral 2

Partime, Brilliant display!

Thanks Classic. That's what happens when you get a surplus of items and a few extra hours. So, as an added bonus (and if someone is actually reading this far), send me an email through the system and I'll get a "broken hat" out to you in a future mailing. I'll see how the responses go to determine how many I can afford to send, and maybe I'll move it to the Giveaway category. No guarantees on perfect quality, but you will get a used "broken hat".

What I have come to realize about this stamp, the trick is finding one that doesn't have a flaw!

Does anyone have an example of the triple transfer variety? What would you consider the upper of the two stamps?

Those perfs look like a guillotine.

Maybe a plate crack that looks like lightning between the flags.
Definitely some doubling.

Looks like a slightly rusted plate to me. I see some odd marks, but no doubling.

What's this variety?

Looks like ink missing. I also see a missing perforation hole and something in the "ing" of "landing"

Peter

looks like the "broken frame line" variety: lower right corner of the stamp.

By the way, I still have many Broken Hat stamps that are free to those that send me an email (and address). Check out this older (locked) thread.

https://goscf.com/t/37531

Did I mention that they were free?

partime, I think you're close to maxing out a useful size if you didn't need to massage the scanner images. Any bigger and you're looking at blobs of ink and paper weave, I think.

But you and Chewie might consider the cheap Chinese-made USB-powered microscopes on ebay. Here's more magnification (for example), but again, your scans are equally useful.:


See? Blobs of ink and paper fibers on a 231 I dug up. This gizmo was under $20 shipped from ebay. I will get shot for mentioning name or linking but it is the one that looks like a pickle. Not perfect by any means but quite useful to me. Spend more money and you'll probably get a bigger field of view (this is the real image size here) and maybe calibrated magnification instead of "let's just focus the thing", plus better lighting. If you've ever played with microscopes then it's harder to find/zero in on something as magnification increases, so be careful of what you ask for.

This is my first post to Stamp Community. I haven't collected US stamps since childhood in the early 1960s, but fate dragged me back into this realm. Dad collected US stamps and local (east central Indiana) postal history. He preserved quite a bit of local postal history that mostly remained untouched, but I have been writing about his "collection" off and on for nearly 20 years.

One of the things Dad preserved was an old wooden shipping crate (square cut nails and all) that he found around 1960. Among many other things, it included many thousands of cut squares and off-paper stamps that had been collected, mostly between 1891 and 1893, in Union City (Randolph County), Indiana, near where I grew up. This hoard included about 3,600 Scott US 230 and 231 stamps that had been placed neatly into circa 1900 Clark O.N.T. sewing thread boxes.


I inherited the crate's contents nearly two decades ago. Many of the stamps are long gone, and I probably have fewer than 100 of the 230s and 231s remaining. From time to time, I do a little research on material from the crate and that is what led me to Stamp Community.

I recently scanned 37 of the 231s to look at "frame break" examples. However, I got sidetracked when I discovered the break in one "broken hat" copy has an unusual appearance. It was filled with color. It didn't appear to be a paper defect or something that happened to the stamp after printing. This stamp still had some gum and some paper adhesions on the back from another 231 copy. So I soaked the stamp to clean it up and to see if that would alter the appearance of the break. It did not.

I searched for information online and found this 2014 thread at Stamp Community where "Partime" had posted a series of images showing the apparent progression of the 231 Columbian "broken hat." His series included an example showing the break half filled with a "shadow." This example appeared to be similar to mine, except that mine is a full "shadow." I don't know enough about the printing process to know how this could happen. I don't know if it is another step in the progression of the "broken hat" variety or something else entirely, but I am curious and would like to hear what others think.

I normally scan at 600 dpi and did so with this example. However, to improve the detail quality in the close-up, I went back and re-scanned this at 2400 dpi.