R152 Varieties I Found In Some Old Checks

Looking through some old checks and found these. One shows a heavy straight line below the stamp, and the other seems to have the lower left corner of the design missing and also has a couple of parallel scratches running from NE to SW.

Oops, I uploaded a check without the broken left lower corner. Instead, it has part of the adjoining stamp to the right, which was rocked in to the plate slightly (0.25mm or so) higher than the complete stamp. I used a photo editor to add the red lines (CTRL-SHIFT to make sure they were straight and at no angle).

The lower left corner missing is just damage, the stamp was torn when the sheet was separated. There were hundreds of millions of these stamps issued, so some minor variations are going to occur. The lines on the face are some minor plate scratches, an interesting find from a philatelic perspective. When a plate is created, each position is entered individually. Minor height discrepancies are not uncommon, even on stamps issued much more recently then 1875. Washington-Franklins show them sometimes. They are fairly common on the earlier First Issues as well.