Ribbed Paper #158 3c Banknote

re: sinclair

Interesting. Do you have an image(s) of this ABN hard paper stamp you could post? Could it be paper that ABN got when they acquired CBN?

A recent article by Ron Burns in the United States Classics Society "Chronicle" lays out what is known about American Bank Note hard paper. The paper has a distinct calendering pattern not seen on Continental Bank Note Company hard paper. I may have posted an image of the ABN 1 cent on cover. It and some off-cover 3 cent examples are pictured in the article. Existence of the paper was first noted in the APS Journal sometime before 1920. I don't recall the exact year. An unused 1 cent pair exists with the ABN logo on attached selvage.

I will probably post an image of the stamp when I am finished establishing what it is. For sure, Clark will play a role. It is a 1c stamp with a captured imprint.

To keep this thread alive and to further my education, I'd like some feedback on the following:

Squinting real hard, the two stamps identified as on ribbed paper within this thread (O57S and O1S) have approximately 36-38 ribs within the height of the stamp design. In contrast, the stamp rlsny shows in the first post has about 58 lines within the stamp's height. So the paper of rlsny's stamp is similar to that of the 1879 J7 illustrated below, which also has about 58 lines within the stamp's height.

And this is in contrast to the 15 cent War Department stamp, O90, I posted up earlier, which shows lines finer than 58 per height of design, so can't be the ribbed paper variety of this stamp.

Right? and Right? or ??





Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Burnside Bob

The best answer to your question is to say when you are trying to identify a stamp, study and consider all of the characteristics of the item.

With the Large Banknotes, that might include color, impression, and date of use or printing as well as paper color, thickness, opacity, texture, and grain.

Perforations too!

Is the ribbing visible (to you) all over the reverse surface? From the image you posted it only appears in a few areas -- see image and arrows.

I would think that if this "ribbing" is only visible on parts of the stamp that it may be some kind of mechanical post production issue.

Frequently what people are calling ribbing is the surface texture of the stamp paper that is imparted by the "wire" of the paper machine. I have no doubt that is what he is talking about.

Hi everyone:

I was away today so did not see the several posts. Thanks Sinclair2010 and banknoteguy for your input.

What I was referring to in my prior post was the patterning of the stamp paper resulting in the appearance of horizontal lines. I have loaded my image into Paint and marked off these lines. Being a simplistic thinker I felt encouraged that counting the apparent ribs or lines across the printed design of a stamp might provide a definitive test for differentiating between the ribbed paper mentioned in rlsny's hopeful starting post and the lined paper my J7 is on.

I have marked off the horizontal lines in my J7. I have tried photographing the stamp paper with oblique lighting, but only with a low degree of success.





Sinclair2010, yes, I think what I'm seeing here is an artifact of the mesh used to make the paper. FWIW, the J7 paper pattern I've called "brick wall", because the pattern resembles a brick wall but without obvious diagonal lines. There is another pattern, presumably resulting from use of a different mesh, that produces paper with pronounced diagonal lines--and it is this patterning that is usually used to illustrate soft paper, as in Brookman, Vol II, page 191. Sinclair, I would be most interested in your thoughts here--more than one paper mfgr using more than one mesh? The ribbed paper being produced on a coarser mesh and different yet than either of these? Or the ribs of the "ribbed paper" are produced some other way--not an artifact of the mesh in the paper making process.



It has been immensely frustrating to me that the decision parameters are never brought to one place and laid out in a decision tree. The John Barwis article "Paper Characteristics of US 3 Cent Stamps, 1870-1881" is as good as it gets, and without doing a certain amount of destructive testing to determine paper permeability and sizing, isn't definitive.

The overall experience is something like Justice Stewart's 1964 description of hard core pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced...but I know it when I see it ..."

Certainly the discussion of Bank Note Paper Types in Brookman, Volume II, pages 189 et seq leads you to, and I quote: ". . . knowledge of the unusual papers will gradually come to you as you notice certain copies have characteristics not common to the normal papers." (Page 193, loc cit).

So some kind of process of osmosis is involved. Maybe Justice Stewart and Lester Brookman knew each other!

Help me out, contributors!

BurnsideBob

I think the horizontal lines you are pointing out are part of the weave of the paper used.