US C3 Airmail Stamps

I have been looking at the C3 airmail stamps and it seems the airplane is all over the place on these things. With so many with the plane in differant positions does it really make it worth alot more because the plane is high or low?
I seem to find this kind of shift alot in the 1901 commemoratives also but they dont sell for tons more because of it.

yes, just how the cookie crumbles

For the Pan Am issue nobody cares much for a boat car or train oddly placed, but for the Jenny the aspect of flight, which was a technological marvel of the time, causes many to fancy the plane being fast or grounded into the frame line. The fastest and most grounded varieties being vary rare and with large catalog premiums. Slow and high planes, interestingly rarely receive mention or notice and likely have little to no premium.

Back to the Pan Am issue, a sinking boat has a negative appeal for obvious reasons, but I suppose a very fast car, Scott 296, would carry a good premium if it existed.

Like Glenn said, it is how the cookie crumbles.

There's a great thread on here somewhere showing the Pan Am stamps in their different "formations"

I just tried searching but couldn't come up with it though

Mike, perhaps this thread?

https://goscf.com/t/37917

Not the one I was thinking of. It's an old thread that the OP revives once in a while and he's posted quite a few of his pickups in it

Yes, if it is a lot more high or low. It is a matter of degree. Or a lot more to one side or the other ("fast" or "slow"). I think Crouse27 explains it best.

Blcjr thank you for the complement. Doing a little research on the grounded and fast plane varieties I found these images. These are the true extremes that are required to get the premiums noted in Scott. It turns out they are very very scarce and very very valuable.

Note these images are both from Power Search that I saved and are credited to the Robert E. Siegel Auction Company. I encourage you to use the Siegel Power Search for C3 with fast and grounded as keywords to read the background history of these neat varieties.

Fast plane



Grounded plane

Here is my fast & low Jenny. She is neither all that fast, nor all that low ... but I am not all that wealthy!

I guess I must be in the minority here, I think that a well centered Jenny should be more valuable than an off centered one. The 'fast', 'slow', 'high' and 'low' varieties are not so much an error stamp as indicative of printing problems of the day. The machines could not center the paper so well for the second printing.

It wasn't the machine, it was the printers. These were done on a hand Spider Press using two plates and a very primitive form of registration. Also the two plates were not exactly equal in size, so it was almost impossible for the plane in every stamp in a sheet to be centered in the middle anyway.

Revcollector - I was unaware of how the C3's were printed, I just knew that it was difficult to center the Jenny on the stamp during the second printing, which is why a well centered copy, in my opinion, is more desirable than the HiLoFastSlo.