Qe1 And Qe2 Used Dry Printing Help

Hello,

While looking through a stock book with my fine friend Frank, we stumbled upon these used Special Handling stamps, and wondered if we might have discovered some with the "Dry Printing" variety. Noticing that the catalog valuation is considerably more ($150 vs. $5), we are looking for advice...

Below are two scans, each one with what we believe is the "Wet Printing" on the left stamp, and "Dry Printing" on the right stamp.

Opinions?

The stamps on the left is the wet printing and the other was the dry printing in 1955. This was done on the 10, 15, and 20 cent denominations only.

The easiest way I've found to distinguish between wet & dry printing for the QEs is to have both varieties in hand … and then compare the widths. For each denomination, as I recall, the dry print is slightly wider than the wet. The difference, while small, can be seen without magnification.

????? The upper right stamp appears to have a cancel date of 1952.

I seem to recall articles in the U.S. Specialist journal in the last decade about differentiating these stamps.

I think the article John Becker is referring to is in the 2007, Volume 78, Number 12 issue of the United States Specialist. If you belong to the USSS (United States Stamp Society), you can view this article in their archives. It was written by Robert Rufe. I took a quick look at it … the wet print widths varied from 35.4 to 36.2 mm with most in the 35.7 to 36.0 range. The dry prints are a consistent 36.4 mm width. The article suggests using a known dry/wet print stamp as a template, but even a 0.2 mm difference can be seen by placing one stamp on top of another. Of course, to be sure that you aren't comparing two wet prints, you would need to verify that the larger is about 36.5mm in width.
Added: While I can't verify the actual width of the scanned stamps, since they were scanned together (in pairs), I can determine their relative width. The two on the left are the wider ones and hence they would be possible dry print candidates. But I suspect that, due to scarcity of used dry prints, all 4 stamps are likely wet prints. Re, the 1952 cancel … the earliest known QE1a cancel is from 1958.


John L.

http://stampsmarter.com/learning/Ma...Methods.html

Don

Thank you for all of these inputs. The 10c on the right does appear to have a 1952 date (however the "2" is not clear). I figured there must be more information out there to identify these printings!

Using the Sonic Imagery Labs Precision U.S. Specialty Multi-Gauge, all of these stamps are 36.2mm or less. Looks like all of these are wet printings.

The odd (false) indicator for us was the very clear, detailed scrollwork and lighter/whitish paper, which led us to think these might be the dry printing.

From the Rufe article, I gathered that many stamp dealers over the years have misidentified some wet print QEs as dry prints. This is because the print quality on some of the wet prints approaches that of the dry. For this reason, physical measurement is frequently a must when identifying QEs.
An additional reason your two stamps on the left are likely wet prints are their color. The dry prints are described as "emerald green" … your two wider examples seem to be of the yellow green shade.
There are a couple of reasons that the dry prints exhibit a consistent width. For one, they were all printed over a 5 day period in October of 1955 (there were runs of the wet in January as well as June-July of 1928 … then they were reprinted in 1940). For another, they were printed on pregummed paper and hence were not dampened & later dried … consequently there was little if any shrinkage.