Is This 11x10.5 Franklin 632 Or 632A?

I was thinking this was 632a given the straight edge, but all of the images I am seeing of 632a is a six-stamp booklet pane and none have a straight edge on the top. Perf is 11x10.5.

Did the edge rows/columns of the 632 sheet have straight edges?

Neither. Several points:

1. You are correct that this stamp is NOT from a booklet as the booklet panes of this series are all panes of 6, 2 stamps wide and 3 stamps high, with a perforated tab at the top and straight edges around the other 3 sides.

2. Your stamp is perf 11x11 (not 11 x 10.5), thus Scott 552. The tell-tale straight edge and cut-line at the top indicate flat plate printing, rather than rotary. Specifically, the press sheet of 400 stamps has printed (unperforated) cut lines to guide in cutting the sheet into panes of 100 for retail sale. Your stamp came from the top row of stamps in one of the lower panes of 100.

3. The 632 stamp is a rotary-press product with a layout ultimately producing panes of 100 for retail sale with a margin all around and thus having no stamps with natural straight edges ... unless they came from a booklet of course!

Thank you. Good lesson on why to re-measure perfs once the stamp is off-paper. Clearly 11x11.

Image width is on the 19 side of the 18.5-19 range, but length is 22. I'm re-purposing the micrometer I swiped from Physics lab way back when. I had already re-purposed it for HO scale modeling.

I don't know whether you are joking or not but,
1. Stealing is wrong.
2. Stealing from a school is especially hurtful to the students and teachers who are already struggling financially.
3. A micrometer is not a good tool for measuring the dimensions of stamps. Paper thickness maybe, but not the printed design.
4. Using image dimensions that are +/- a fraction of a millimeter in either direction as an indicator of stamp identification is prone to error. There are usually better techniques depending on the issue.

That aside, what you have is a nice "position piece". As John mentioned, the guide line at the top shows that stamp was from the top row of the pane. Obviously only 10% of the stamps in the pane come from the top row, and often the guide line is cut off and all you have is a straight edge. The one that you have is a nice representation, and with good centering. Not valuable, but appreciated by people who collect such things. Here are some examples of guidelines on that stamp from each of the edges and all 4 corners.

You can also learn more about straight edges lines here;
https://stampsmarter.org/learning/I...reLines.html
Don

I must admit that I cringe whenever I see the "blocks" of 9 stamps mounted with the guide lines around the edges. While it was a popular thing to do in the pre-WWII collecting era, it is factually incorrect and may mislead those trying to understand production and layout details..

Here are 9 stamps which are placed correctly along a drawn-in guideline. These lines were at the center of the press sheet of 400 stamps, and thus along 2 sides of a pane of 100 as sold at a post office, with the two outer sides having selvege conatining the plate number, etc.


That is why I was careful to state previously:


And could have added that it was not from the two center stamps. With the line only along the top, your stamp is from one of 18 positions of the 400 on the press sheet.

Hi John,
I hear you. The basis for my collection of these is an old-timey album that was already started in this format. It would be a big effort to deconstruct it and re-arrange the stamps in the "correct" order. I have considered it, especially every time that I try to mount an arrow copy or sheet margin with selvedge that doesn't fit right in the square box layout. For some issues I could conceive of creating an entire reconstructed sheet (at least of the edges and corners of all the panes, like how you build a jigsaw puzzle from the outside in), but for now I will stick with the boxed-in approach because it is simple, even though knowing it is technically inaccurate.