1847 Issue Stamps - Plating

Did Neinken or anyone else make plating drawings for the 1947 5c and 10c stamps? I am finding a lot of photos of multiples and found some indications of plating drawings that were made. A lot of the 10c issues have plating numbers on them.

Perry plated the 10c stamp back in the 1920s. That plating is in the Smithsonian and was last on display during Washington 2006. Many of the stamps are still on-cover, and no published account is available to my knowledge.

The Elliott Perry plating of the ten-cent 1847 issue was published in the Collector's Club Philatelist serially during the 1920's. It has never been republished (I have suggested to USPCS that this would be a worthy endeavor for the society). Leonard Hartmann used to offer photocopies of this work, but I don't know how good the quality would be. The five-cent was regarded as unplateable until a complete proof sheet was discovered some years ago.

I agree that bringing the 10c plating to the forefront would be a good plan. Its out there, I still have, I think, a set of photocopies from when I used to have the CCP.

There is no full plating of the 5c stamp. There are quite a few people over time, most of whom have wished to remain anonymous, who have made some progress on it. To my knowledge, all of them have essentially given up and declared it unplatable en masse. In other words, there are plenty of positions that probably can be documented, but way more than that, which are very difficult.

Not unlike Plate 4 of the 1c stamp, which changed appearance so rapidly, it often seems as though no two 5c stamps from the same position look the same. When a friend discovered the T-crack, which he plated to position 69R, and I verified for him - that gave us a nice plate variety to study. I quickly found 3 others, and somewhere around 25 were found pretty easily. My personal experience is that the crack did not look much the same on any two copies. Also, on the specimen proof sheet - which is right pane, the crack was absent wholly.

Working on the 5c stamp is a project I've always had interest in, and its definitely worthwhile, as there is progress that can be made, and has been made, which hasn't been documented or well-documented. So, if someone grabbed this torch, there are things to find and document. Don't get your hopes up that you'll reconstruct the whole thing, but fun can be had.

One nice thing is the vertical 9L column, with the dot in S. When doing a plate reconstruction, you look for margin copies to get started. Dot in S here, is just as good as a margin copy since you know the column.

There is also position 80R and 90R which are consistent double transfers. That is how we plated the T-crack. My friend had a strip where the right stamp was a right sheet margin, and the stamp to the left of it was a T-crack. Since it didn't exhibit dot in S, we knew it was right pane. When I examined the item, I could see the top of the 80R double transfer just barely in the bottom margin of the marginal stamp. So his item was 69-70R with the T-crack being 69R.

Just in thinking about it a bit, it seems as though the 5c stamp could probably best be plated / documented in a way similar to what njs had proposed for the 1c stamp. This, via some spreadsheet method, where certain repeatable minutia about each position are recorded. Key spots on the stamp - like 'design short here' vs 'not short here', etc.

For the 5c stamp, you have guide dots in the left trifoliate, vertical blurs in the margin (particularly on the right pane), framelines which have distinct differences, dot-in-S, to start with.

If I remember correctly, Jerry Wagshal was trying to organize a plating effort back when he was the section editor for the 1847's in the Chronicle - maybe mid-90s - but I don't think it progressed far.

I believe the plated 10-cent collection (on cover) that was displayed at the National Postal Museum in 2006 was from the Benjamin Miller collection (kept at the New York Public Library).

I'm reasonably familiar with Jerry's effort in the 90s. There were several people working on it then, including a (different) good friend of mine, who is now gone. Additionally another person whom Jerry identified in the Chronicle as "Lone Star". I know who he is now, and he wishes to remain anonymous, as he avoids the spotlight. There were one or two other people, also now gone who also did some work.

I'm not aware of anything that got published.

Scott Trepel's writeup of the Wagshal sale of Jerry's 1847's had some good writeups on frameline varieties and such, that I don't know if that's been well written up anywhere else.

Bill Gross on plating efforts for the 5c issue

http://chronicle.uspcs.org/pdf/Chro...10/12746.pdf

Thanks for posting that. I knew that block had been plated, but I totally forgot about that article.

Siegel has some decent scans of the sheet(s), but it sounds like maybe the NPM has really good images. I agree that's a big help.

Here is where Siegel had these for sale:

https://siegelauctions.com/sales.php?sale_no=1047

These are actually better scans than I had remembered.
Some study can definitely be done from these.

Yes, the Miller collection, how could I forget. I remember that most of the 10-cent 1847 covers were from the Ludlow Beebe correspondence. That must have been a huge discovery at the time. I even have a Ludlow Beebe cover, stampless of course.

The Miller collection also had a number of other platings of the 1851 Issue, the 1-cent and 3-cent stamps. Hard to believe that plating was so advanced at that time. It must have been nice to be a collector in those days.

Oh yes, and those proof panes, I have photographs of both. Seems the Champion Stamp Company, Inc made some photographic copies in 1998. I don't know how many were distributed. They are fun to look at.

I remember reading in Linn's, perhaps 15-20 years ago about how a complete plate proof sheet of the 5c was newly discovered. If I'm not mistaken, there was a similar sheet of the 10c discovered at the same time, but I am not as sure of my memory on that one. They were glued together, or they were glued to some type of backing, and part of the restoration process involved 'soaking' them off. I remember reading that they were expected to help GREATLY in the plating of the 5c since it had never been done before that. Perhaps someone with more knowledge (or memory) can expand on this.

Great insight and valuable links. I have been contemplating the plating project for a few days now and looking around to see what I can find. On both stamps, the issue seems to be the lack of multiples to examine. So I went back in time to the Ashbrook photos from the early 1950s. There was a lot more available multiples at that time. A specimen right pane of the 5c Franklin was found a while back. I would like to find a way to get a high res copy. The left pane should be easy because of the dot in S on the entire 9th column. Going through the Ashbrook photos, I have found positions 31-80L1 as shown below. I am far from finished looking though. There are a lot of photos to search through.



Edit: Made adjustments to lower left strip to match in better.

https://goscf.com/t/51483

I remember when I plated my 69L. I got excited that I could plate the 5c using the guide dots left side.
I gave up after a few nights. It's tough to plate single stamps of Scott 1. Those guide dots are tough to use to plate. It seems like it should be easy. 1st vertical column from right plate has no dots... seems so easy yet it's soooo hard.

I am trying to concentrate on more than just the guide dots. I am looking for all marks and will have to see which are consistent later. This what what I am doing....