When Does Bad Centering Become A Good Thing? 90c US 122

to me, the original item is poorly centered rather than bad enough to be a freak (if it were a cheap item, then I'd possibly be more willing to consider it a freak)

Of course, the sheer numbers of inexpensive stamps make it much more likely that there will be extreme freaks--for example, there are many examples of misperfed 3c pictorials, including this one:



By that standard, my stamp is just poorly centered. On the other hand, only one other copy of the 90c I've seen (the Siegel copy at $10000) shows more of the adjacent image. It's probably harder to find a copy as off-centered as mine than it is to find one with a red cancel, but for obvious reasons that doesn't make it especially valuable!

From my perspective, there is some interest in the way that a really badly centered 90c stamp can display aspects of the bicolor printing process--the way the printer used the vertical black lines to position the sheet during the second (carmine) pass through the press. This allowed for alignment between the frame and the portrait even when (as in this case) the portrait had been printed radically off-center.

Most of the 'freaks' I've seen of the 90c pictorial advertised by dealers involve poor placement of the frame in relation to the Lincoln portrait.

One of the reasons the 1869 issue was so poorly received is that they were often badly centered. Examples showing part of an adjacent stamp abound.