Odd #34 Small Queen?

Still piling through this inheritance and learning what I can!

I came across this #34 Half Cent small queen. It seems odd for a couple reasons so I was hoping someone could set me straight on it. The first thing I immediately noticed was the border size seems very large to the perforations compared to the other two pictured with it. Secondly, the colour paper seems a bit different. More white I would characterize it. Third, on the back of the stamp it looks like there is a negative image that does not line up with the front image. I have not seen that on any other stamps in my very limited experience.

Any ideas?

Could it be a private perfing of a plate-proof? (off-set).

1. While perforation was done mechanically, spacing of lines of perforation was variable for a long time. It got more accurate as time went on, but there was still very small variations even up to the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the sheet margin of this and it's easy to see how variable overall stamp size could be, in this case, the width:

(not my block)

You might wonder, where are the stamps with no margins at all due to wonky perforation? Probably rejected by the printers and destroyed, or later, ignored and possibly destroyed by collectors.

2. By the last comparison scan, It appears that the difference in paper colour is due to incomplete wiping of the printing plate so that a thin film of ink appears on the parts that are not printed. Here it's a sort of bluish black tinge. Flip the stamps over and compare the backs; they should be much more similar. This is not a flaw or variety, and is fairly common as you will find. There will also be differences due to ageing/storage, of course.

3. Where this is often called an offset, it is probably more properly called a set-off. Ink can be transferred to the back of printed sheets when the sheets are stacked up and the ink is not perfectly dry. However, in this case, I think the design(s) was transferred from the backing plate of the printing press, where the printed image of the sheet has been transferred for whatever reason. When another sheet is fed into the press soon after that happens, the image is applied to its back like this. Again, this happens occasionally and is not considered valuable.

The top scan certainly can be considered a jumbo/jumbo margined stamp albeit very faulty. Being well centered, it would be worth a decent premium today if it were sound, but it is what it is. Jumbos were not a big deal with collectors long ago, but centering was and still is.

Thanks again for the detailed reply hy-brasil! Info is always appreciated.

What you say about the printing press makes complete sense. The only thing about the margins messing me up is the sheets dimension of it. My brain says that if it would be bigger on the one side, should it not be smaller on the other as if the sheet was offset in the cutter, or was it that all over the map then that you could actually have much larger and smaller stamps overall from the same sheet?
Lastly, looking at the back of the odd stamp beside one of the others, it appears there is no gun on the larger one while the normal one has a gummed back like you would expect to find. Again, normal'ish'?
Forgive me... I know I am fishing for what I hope to hear, that maybe I have found a bit of a diamond in the rocks, but I can't lie that this is quite a bit of fun! I love learning all this new stuff and trying to plow through it all is facinating!

Isn't that what we are seeing in the block shown?



The purple mark on the jumbo stamp is a cancel. It has been used and soaked off the paper it was on.

The jumbo is a very faulty stamp. Perhaps a keeper as a reference, but it is of little monetary value.

It's probably from a corner plate position, upper left (I cannot say left or right pane - it was a 2 x 100 subject printing plate with a gutter margin between). The settings of the perforator could be wider at the margins without the perfs cutting into the stamp. Note the stacking offset on the reverse also shows a jumbo-margined stamp.

The purple mark is doubtless a postal marking.


There was a "thicker paper" used in some earlier printings but I can't tell from the scan if yours is one.

Just to add to archerg.

The large margins are a bonus to this stamp and the condition would be Extremely Fine since it is centered well within the margins. It's too bad that there is a fault at the lower right and top right where the corner is missing.

Purple mark is a postmark.

The paper colour due to the use of different type of paper. Collectors do collect the different types of paper, moreso in the issue just prior to this (Large Queens), but there is interest in the paper types of this issue (Small Queens).