Show Your US 1857 Perforated Stamps

A pair of 10c Ty V (35) showing part of the "No 2" at bottom left side.

This 26A is on a cover sent between two towns unfamiliar to me: McGrawville NY to Horicon WI. On the back of the cover is the notation "7R10L". But it looks like 3L11E. Can I get a confirmation? And what do we call the color?

Is that a guide dot in the upper right?

Definitely a GD (guide dot) at upper right.

Definitely a top row A relief -- with a repaired damaged transfer above the LLR (lower left rosette)

Too bad that the reference material for plates 10 and 11 is not publicly available -- otherwise this would probably be a 5 minute plating job -- at least with regard to the position ID -- albeit differentiating the state of the plate (i.e., Early, Intermediate, or Late) can often be challenging

I need to check and see if the top row of plates 10 and 11 were repaired or not -- as going off memory, I recall that on plate 10, only one of the two panes was repaired and the other not (but I might be wrong on that)?

I found an email from RCC confirming that the top row of the left pane of plate 10 was not repaired, but the rest of 10 and 11 were.

I have reference scans of 10e and 11e, but not much of the other states. More later...

The LFL of the subject stamp (right) matches the plate 11 reference (center); the LFL of the plate 10 reference (left) is similar but, among other things, it doesn't touch the UL rosaette. (The guide dot evidence is ambiguous.)




I guess the real question is what does 7R10L look like? I wish more reference photos were available to the public.

Hi ttreen --

To my eye -- all 3 of those compressed scans look like each are a from different position.

In comparing the right stamp (patient) against the plate 11 reference (center), the lower end of the patient stamp's LFL sharply bends out versus only a subtle trace of a bend on the plate 11 reference.

That said -- unless the paper on all 3 of these stamps is perfectly flat -- any bends, creases, etc can easily introduce artificial curves into the images.

Can you post a full sized image of the plate 11 reference stamp for further comparison and comment?

Regards // ioagoa

I thought I could explain away the bottom of the LFL on the 3L11E reference, but nowI don't know what to think. Here's the image (dowmloaded from "One Drive" and cropped).

Hi ttreen --

Thank you for posting your reference copy of position 3L11E.

I made compressed scans capturing both the left and right frame lines of both your patient stamp and the 3L11E reference copy -- and am now confident that the patient stamp is not position 3L11E. In addition to the difference in the bend at the lower end of the LFL -- the white spacing relationship between the RFL and the design is also off. See images below.

At this point I don't know what else to say other than most of the confirmed reference material for these #26A stamps is held by a very small number of collectors and has not yet been made publicly available in the same way that Chase made his imperforate 3c plate reconstructions available as references for others to use -- which is too bad -- as publicly available reference material would help generate more interest in plating of the US Classics -- and we definitely need more collectors.

Regards // ioagoa

PS -- This would be a good stamp to post to our study group -- as I am pretty sure that one of the members should be able to plate it in short order.

Compressed image of your patient stamp is here:


Compressed image of your 3L11E reference copy is here:

A couple stamp I think I've identified:

This one looks like Scott#18, type #1:


This one was identified by the previous owner as Scott 22, type IIIa - with the cut cut in, I'm not sure