Please Help To Identify Japanese Revenues & Documents 1890's?

Over the weekend I looked through my 5 sen revenues and noticed vast detail differences in the stamps. These scans show different amounts of detail as well as colour difference

No. 1 stamp show clear detail, while in No.2 the detail is rather lost especially in the concentric circles.

Could this be a result of a worn printing plate/stone, badly etched or a under inked impression?

I am guessing that both these stamps are the 1873 rouletted issues and how many 5 sen plates have been recorded to date?





On the 1 sen value I noticed that this stamp has the left side line extended upwards and that a partial inscription is missing, both highlighted with arrow.

Are these listed varieties and can they be plated, also were the same plates used for printing of the 1874 perforated issues?




There is a slight size difference between the images that I have studying to date. Is this image size difference found on all the 1873/74 issues?

I have placed the same red frame around the images of the stamps to show the variation in size of image. I realise this is probably well known amongst collectors of this type of material, apologies if I have repeated something which is already known and is obvious. For me this is the start of an adventure into these interesting revenue stamps.




Andrew

Apologies for not being able to post any images due to my absence from home... please allow me to express my observations first; I'll come back later with images of examples.




No clear conclusion why this does happen, but the three possible reasons youve mentioned can make this faint impression, I believe. I do have a couple of similar examples, showing a very faint trace of the fine lines in the ornaments. As for the first issues, the first printing ususally have lighter and paler colour which may cause some unclear and blunt image, and the later printing having more dark and clear impression.

One interesting thing you should observe is the strokes of the central Kanji characters, especially the vertical stroke of "P"-shaped part; it is not totally filled with ink, and the outer frame (tge two vertical border lines) of the stroke could been only seen. Some of my similar examples have two vertical border lines for "1" in the value inscription, but the remaining part of the stamp is quite sound and has quite sharp impression... I am hoping somebody having experience of observing this sort of "character strokes being not fully filled" in postage stamps, and have a certain explanation may leave us some comments.

Anyway, such apparent characteristics should be of a good clue for plating and identifying the position, so I personally consider them very valuable.

- Hironobu

Apparent mistake in engraving the outer frame boundary lines could be observed quite frequently, and from my experience pretty often in 10 Sen pale red / pink stamps. Apparent errors such as completely missing a part of the lines (in particular, the lower or upper frame boundary of waring inscriptions in both sides) are listed in Furuya and Hasegawa catalogues, but the rather minor errors like a slight extention of the frame lines are not listed in the catalogues.

Even though they are not ranked as "errors" in catalogue, such unique characteristics can surely identyfy the stamp, and its position in a complete sheet.

Hironobu, thank you for your detailed replies.

They have been a great help, I can now try and sort out my small holding of these revenues into some temporary order showing depth of colours, quality of impressions and the different perforations.

This will be quite a challenge for me, as I await delivery of the Hasegawa catalogue for a more detailed understanding of these issues.

Andrew

For those who have been following this topic, I am please to report that in today's post I have received the Japanese revenue catalogue by Mr Hasegawa

It is truly a very informative catalogue as Mr Hasegawa goes into detail, especially on the hand engraved etched revenue stamps from 1873 onwards.

Looking back at a few notes made some 20 years ago, I have a reference that over 100+ printing plates were made of the 1873 1 SEN revenue stamp throughout its usage?

I am not sure where I obtained this information could someone help where this may have originated from?

Andrew

I have being trying to sort out my 1873 engraved revenue stamps which are rouletted. I am not sure if I am on the right track in determining the size of the roulettes or how to go about establishing the roulette size?

In the scan below I've counted that there are 23.5/24 kind of pin perfs. I understand that these stamps are found either 18 or 14.5 roulette?

Appreciate any help or insight given




Andrew

Is that 18 or 14.5 roulette per 2 cm? Seems it would be difficult to measure when each cut varys.

Thanks for your reply littleriverphil,

I never thought of that.

I have a perforation gauge which I can just about use. Is there a proven method of measuring
roulettes?

Andrew

Hi Andrew,




Mr. Furuya has listed 60 plates for the 1873 1 Sen revenue (the 1st series) in the former catalogue (Narumi's Japanese Fiscal Stamp Catalogue, 5th Edition) and I believe your reference is something close to this. The new catalogue, the 6th Edition, Hasegawa mentions (on page 146) that;

- the number of printing plates is unknown,

- limited efforts have been made for identifying the plates, and it is almost hopeless to build up the individual plates one by one (i.e. the conventional method of reconstructing the plates),

- temporary number of plates have been proposed and listed on the former edition (=5th edition by Furuya), but these proposal is now rejected and thus the plating study should be made from scratch.

So lots of fun still left for us

Hironobu

The Shimomura catalogue (my 1981 edition) lists 14, 14.5 or 18. No definite description in Furuya or Hasegawa, but on page 146 of Hasegawa catalogue there is an example of compound roulette of 14.5 x 16. It seems that the pitches of the roulettes are not so well defined or studied thus it might be another attractive side of there revenue stamps to be studied further.

The roulette 14.5 could be also found on Cherry Blossom 1 sen brown 1875. T. Woodward[1] suggest that this roulette is the same as those used for the revenue stamps, but recent study [2] mentions that this theory of Woodward remains unconfirmed.


[1] T. Woodward, "The Postage Stamps of Japan and Dependencies" 1923; Japanese version by T. Sugiura, 1972.
[2] "The Specialized Catalogue of Japanese Hand Engraved Stamps", p. 38, 2007.

-Hironobu

Hi Hironobu

Thank you for the insight on the roulettes and the various references. This is certainly interesting, I will need more of these revenue stamps before I take the next step.

Meanwhile I think I better reign in my enthusiasm for contemplating to study these issues especially as I have only limited examples available to me. No wonder these were left in my 'pending file' for all these years....

Andrew

Today I have managed to located the above reference which I mentioned in a previous posting.

'The American Revenuer, May, 1981 page 91'
Titled 'Plating Early Japanese Revenues' by D. Sheaff, ARA – Link below:

http://tar.revenuer.org/TAR1981.05.pdf

Interesting insight on how the printing plates were produced and the probable reason as to why so many plates were made, any more thoughts?

Andrew

This is interesting. I would love to see any playing results made by Mr McNeil... does anyone have further information on the plating done or proposed by Mr McNeil ?

-Hironobu

My notebook also says "the width could vary from about 23.5mm to 24.5mm or more", and also mentioning "need to check if any correlation between width and plate/issue exists". Today I checked several examples, and it seems that (with few exceptions), for the 5th issue (electroplated) 1 Sen black (separation gap of 3mm) the width is fairly constant, ranging from 24.2 to 24.6mm. The earlier issues on native paper may show significantly smaller width of about 24.0mm or less (cannot deny the possibility to be caused by paper shrinking).

I believe that the variation in width (and height) is not well studied as there are no words or descriptions in Furuya nor Hasegawa catalogue (there should be at least some words if they knew something in particular...).

Thus we do need to accumulate actual data and search for any reasonable correlation between the width and plate/issues. Still a long way to go...

-Hironobu

Hi Andrew;



I am pretty sure that you've already spotted that the lower left stamp, lacking the small scroll pattern in right, is identical to error I-26 in Hasegawa, p.149. Congratulations for the nice variation !

-Hironobu