Washington 1c Stamp; Something Odd About The Back

I love this stamp. It's color is rich and the cancellation is not so dark that it takes away much from the picture, nor does it seep through to the back. The original gum is almost fully intact.



The only thing I don't understand is this:



It seems to me that the soaked through some while making this stamp. Right? But then...



...Why or how is it that the inked outline on the back of the stamp doesn't match up with the actual outline of the picture in front?

Does anyone has an answer, or an explanation of what may have happened to this stamp??

Thank you.

Whoops! Haha. Above the last picture, it should say, "..that the INK soaked through..". My bad.

Your stamp was printed with flat plates onto sheets of paper (as opposed to curved rotary plates onto rolls of paper). The sheets were stacked when the ink was slightly tacky and your stamp shows ink set-off from the next sheet in the stack. The sheets were then gummed, so the ink on the reverse side is under the residual gum. This set-off is a very common characteristic of flat plate stamps. It is not soak-through, as you noted the mis-alignment of set-off to the image to the front.

Ohh, ok. That makes sense now. Thank you! Mystery solved.

Do you perhaps know whether that affects the value of the stamp?

No additional financial value, but the education you just received can be priceless when you are trying to identify some of the Washington/Franklin series stamps. Knowing how to identify a stamp as flat plate printing is important and knowing what setoff is one of the pieces of the puzzle.
Don

You are very right 51studebaker. But how can you find where/when a stamp was originally printed by a set-off??

US stamps of this era were printed by one of three press types; flat plate, offset (not to be confused with setoff), and rotary. You can learn more here
http://stampsmarter.com/learning/Ho...anufact.html
and here
http://stampsmarter.com/learning/Ma...methods.html
Don