MDi Booklets: Who Removed The Stamp?

Can anyone explain the process by which a stamp was removed from a pane that was ultimately included in a MDI booklet? Did the printing company remove the stamps before it shipped the panes to MDI, or did the employees of MDI remove the stamps, thereby converting 16-stamp panes into 15-stamp panes?

It appears that the printers did the work for the self-adhesive stamps and MDI did the water activated:

http://www.nwpl.org/PDF/Newsletters/2006-09-BR.pdf

Acronym MDI = MINNESOTA DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRIES

Nowhere in that article does it say who removed one of the stamps to reduce the number to 15. It has always been my understanding that the printers did the die cut and pane slicing, but for the ones that had 16 stamps the MDI workers were the ones who removed the extra stamp.

For the Midnight Angel books of 30 with the stamps removed, they most commonly removed the stamp from position 4 or 14 (depending in whether the pane was a 4-6-6 pane or a 6-6-4 pane, the numbers being the number of positions in each of the 3 sections of the pane), with positions 1 and 16 being next most common, followed by 2 & 3, 13 & 15, 6 and very infrequently 5 (and occasionally they forgot and created a pane of 16 in a book of 31). I have a specialized collection of them with all the different top/bottom pane position combinations I can find. There are dat more combinations in the 3629X covers than in the 3629 covers. One thing the article fails to mention is some Midnight Angel books have a sticker on the back cover changing a 3629 cover into a 3629X cover and a small number of them have the sticker covering up an incorrect Flag over Porch description.

edited to add, the pane pictured in the article is a 6-6-4 pane with a stamp removed from position 16 (know as an E-16 pane, the 4-6-6 are called F)

Probably more than you wanted to know.

One big question we still have is how many of each type of MDI booklets were made?

Am I misunderstanding something?

"Am I misunderstanding something?"

Yes. The OP is asking about self-adhesive panes that were cut as panes of 16 (that did not include a re-order label) and then had a stamp removed by hand to make them a pane of 15.

I read it as the printing company provided panes of 15 if required. MDI applied the label. Maybe I still don't understand.

"I read it as the printing company provided panes of 15 if required. MDI applied the label. Maybe I still don't understand."

Yep, you still don't understand.

Some panes were cut so they had 15 stamps plus a re-order label (printed with the stamps, not added by MDI - the only lables MDI applied were to the back covers of some booklets and those were not re-order labels). Other paned were cut so they had 16 stamps and the extra stamp had to be removed by hand.

The first MDI booklets were made from self-adhesive sheets.
The sheets (regular sheets which were previously cut into 20 panes + 1 label, also called "convertible booklets") were cut at the printer into individual panes of 14,15,16. The backs of those panes look "weirdly miscut", as they are 2 stamps wide, while the "normal" self-adhesive booklets are 3 stamps wide.

The later MDI booklets were made from ordinary water-activated sheets. These sheets were provided by the USPS on a need-to-have basis. I do not know how the accounting was done with sheets of 20/50/100 that left surplus stamps at MDI after pulling 15 (or multiples of 15) off the sheets for the booklets.

Noone knows how many MDI booklets were actually manufactured at MDI (I've been trying to finf that out for years).