1c 1851 Plate 1-Late Stamps

I definitely agree that the Gross sheet is a late printing showing significant wear. I am wondering, however, if part of the issue with ornament X on that copy has to do with a possible abrasion. There is a clear abrasion just to the left of that spot, and I cannot be sure if it didn't take part of X with it. Not clear. At the 1c plating archive, the copy there is an earlier impression and has a pretty strong ornament X (32R1L).

I'll try to spend some time staring at 32R1L today.

As an aside, this exercise is a good illustration of how some A reliefs can be a bit difficult to plate, even with recuts to look at. Imagine on Plate 1E, 2 and 3 where there are no recuts to help out. I recall some times where I'd stare at a stamp for about 6-7 hours overnight, and maybe around the last hour I'd finally see something microscopically different that would afford the breakthrough to actually plate it.

32R1L looks very good to me.

The recuts I think are a perfect match. The top recut has an ever so slight dip above the O in POSTAGE which I think I see on stallzer's stamp. The bottom recut is a very good match.

Neinken alert - the bottom recut on 32R1L in Neinken is drawn wrong. It is a long recut exactly per stallzer's stamp.

Everything else I can make out agrees very well. I'm not taking time to look for other candidates, but if you guys think this is the last possible candidate, then this is definitely it.

This is one reason why I think the preservation of classic multiples is important and why I deplore the practice of chopping them up in order to obtain high-graded singles.

I think it is 32R1L also. I checked columns 2, 6, and 9. Column 9 may not have the spacing, but I checked anyway. Most have easy plate marks or a significantly different recut at top or bottom. The 32R was the only one that had any chance.

It takes a village... stallzer, we have consensus on 32R1L.

Thanks again for the "village" effort. I'll tag it as 32R1L. I'll post another puzzler later today.

Here is an interesting pair showing full bottom plumes from the stamps above. It almost has to be 17-18R1L. The 7-8R1L is the only pair complete (R/L). I wish the bottom would have been cut better.

Agreed, 17-18R1L. Pretty cool capture of the plumes from 7-8R1L.

Here is a reconstruction of Plate 1 Late left pane, based on my collection. Many of these are on piece, folded letter or cover. I sent jaxom100 scans of my holdings and he cropped the images as needed and arranged them as shown here. Kudos to him! Right pane to follow.

dudley - that's very very nice. Only about 10% pen cancels and good margins on most - that's a very nice reconstruction. You even got a couple partial imprint captures.

jaxom - we all appreciate your terrific image manipulation work here.

I have updated the reconstructed Plate 1-Late Left page http://stampsmarter.com/features/SQ...ngReCon.html
Don

Thanks, Don and txstamp. This time around I was concentrating on the two M's (multiples and margins).

Here's the companion Plate One Late right pane, again the result of jaxom100's awesome graphic work.

Great stuff dudley. Great stuff.

Next, I am going to work on his plate 8 stamps to populate the database. He sent me a few images to work with (thanks). I was also wondering what those two plate images would look like if I overlapped the stamps. As it was, I tried to leave the images the actual size of the stamps. I could overlap the ones that have extra parts, like a big jigsaw puzzle.