10c Washington SC #68 Double Transfer

The streaks were caused by a poor job wiping the plate. Also, I don't believe this is a double transfer, but is a very dry print.

Your answer raises more questions for me. Wouldn't a poor job of wiping the plate leave excess ink? Which would seem to be the opposite of a very dry plate. Or if you meant that the poor job took too much ink off the plate then why the streaks? I am kinda new and don't have much background on the processes used to print.

Also this variety is supposed to have a double transfer at bottom on plate position 47R2. I have attached an example from Siegel auctions:




This one has plenty of ink, but if it was very dry wouldn't you see the 2nd set of lettering and not the ink in the lettering (TEN CENTS) as you see on the Siegel example?

Thanks for looking.

I agree that the #35 appears to exhibit a dry print rather than a DT. DT's will always show areas of color where there shouldn't be. White areas that are out of place are caused by different mechanisms.

I do however disagree with rev on the streaks. Most of the time they come directly from the transfer roll and are repeated with every entry. I think sometimes there is also an explanation having to do with metallurgy. With my stamp, I would concede that the streak on my stamp could possibly be a little darker due to a plate wiping issue. My point being though, that the streak is very much part of the plate.

My last post was being typed while the previous was being posted. Hopefully you will find some answers in there for you.

Here is another bottom row 68 with the same blur as the other that I posted. I cannot decide if it is the same position as the other but it certainly appears to at least be a later impression from the same plate. Just showing for the Missourians of the board...

Sinclair, The bottom perfs on your two overlapped stamps seem a slightly different gauge from each other. Is one of them reperfed?

Don't think so. Must be parallax error from my scanner being out of level :)

Winston, I don't see a guide dot at the bottom right for the stamp underneath the one with an obvious dot at BR.

I'm not terribly familiar with this issue, but, unless it is hiding, I would think that would eliminate any possibility of it being the same position.

edit: I will say even if the plate was re-entered, unless the original dot is small, the original ones frequently don't get fully ironed out.

Yeah, I haven't taken any careful measurements but I was thinking the dot was possibly taken out by the perf hole. It doesn't matter either way, the point of showing the second stamp was to show that the blurs are from the plate.

I agree that guide dots tend to survive re-entry quite well. Not that I think even a little bit that the two stamps are from different states of the plate.

We should be referring to these dots as layout dots not guide dots and that is what I will try to do henceforth.

I got out the serious plating toys, Tex, and I am measuring about 0.8mm of white space between the ornaments and the layout dot on the second stamp that I posted, the first stamp that I posted has about 0.85 mm of white space, 0.05mm isn't much room but may be enough to show some color if there was ever any there to show, it is possible that the first stamp is actually from the left margin and never had a dot at lower right. Also, under 30X magnification, the layout dots at lower left are quite dissimilar. The quality of the impression is different between the two stamps but the DT's seem to express themselves differently as well. So, not very likely at all to be the same position, even if from different plate states.

John, I did my best to scan the stamps end to end. The one stamp with scissor trimmed perfs makes for some difficulties. I think that the stamps were skewed enough to cause a bit of an optical illusion that the perfs gauged differently. They really do not. Another thing that you may not be able to appreciate from the scan is that the paper of one is relatively hard and the other is a fair amount softer, that alone can cause perfs to appear different.

Its actually pretty funny that you mentioned that, as I almost called it a layout dot in my original post, but I really don't know the layout of the plates for this stamp, and didn't spend much time looking at it.

For general readers - fine layout lines are scribed directly on the plate, often terminated by small 'dots' to allow positioning of the layout lines themselves.

Guide dots are actually from the side point attached to the transfer roll itself, so they get impressed on the plate as part of actual plate entry. They tend to be bigger than layout dots, and you will find them associated with each transfer roll setting. One guide dot per setting (typically).

You must be heavily influenced by the theory of the so-called "guide-reliefing" method of transfer roll setting, which sort of diminishes the importance of guide dots. I think the guide dots were put on the plate before a single position was entered and were perhaps used almost exclusively to position the transfer roll. While the guide-reliefing theory may help explain some things, it fails miserably to explain others.

Yes, its been a very long-standing chicken/egg type of debate, whether the side-point created the guide dot or whether it was simply inserted into a previously existing one.

Either way, you mostly get the same result, so it has been hard to reach any final conclusion.