Black Jack Badly Off Center - Printed Beyond Sheet Margin?

Hi everybody, I find the right side intriguing.
Did the print pass beyond the margin of the sheet? What do you think? Thank you,,,,,

No, it probably was where a large sheet of 400 stamps was cut into four easier to handle sheets of 100


Peter

That is a keeper, very nice misperforate stamp. More than likely the press sheet of 400 stamps was in a stack of other sheets but was not stack properly. In this case the sheet shifted to the life and was out of line. Then the stack of sheets was cut into sheet of 100. Then the sheets of 100 was passed threw the perferation machine. In doing so the design is misperforate. The quality control was not as strictly adhered to back then. You will see a lot of early perforated stamps misperforate. It depends on how much the stamp is off center and it overall attractiveness to it value to a collector. As to your stamp it is very attractive and is shifted to the south west giving you parts of four stamps. I would add that stamp to my collection, it is a keeper.

There are 3 important steps here:
1. printing, which went fine. I believe these were press sheets of 200, with a left and right pane of 200.
2. perforating, which was a bit off in both directions, then lastly
3. Cutting the press sheet into 2 panes of 100, which creates the natural staright edge along the right side. Also a bit sloppy, leaving a small "straddle" across the panes into the adjacent stamp.

So if the stamp is bad enough it becomes good again?

If production issues are outside of normal tolerances, the stamp newer becomes "good again" but rather it becomes interestingly collectible as an example showing production methods and missteps. Such examples can carry a value to specialists equal to or beyond the value of properly produced example. Of course while it my have value, the stamp will always be poorly centered.

This particular stamp IMO is just poorly centered, an affliction of this issue in general and because it is a common problem for this issue it does not fit into the EFO domain. I am a fan of straddle margin stamps even though they are a really tough sell with the best centering. People dig symmetry ie; perfs all around etc.

Rogdcam, I understand your position but I do disagree with your assessment. I also collect EFO straddle stamps. They are different degrees of misperf and straddle stamps. Having one of each would be a nice thing. I think the stamp shown is very nice and as I said I would gladly add it to my collection. Not every thing needs to be a dramatic shift or straddle to be collectable. This one shown is a nice example and would be affordable addition to anyone's collection. Some straddle stamps that are dramatically shifted are very expensive and out if reach for many collectors. Not saying this stamp shown will not have a nice premium to someone. I do beleive you are a little harsh in you assessment of this stamp. You are a very conservative collector and your opinion is highly valued.

I have agreed with your assessments on may stamps and value your contributions. In this case I must disagree I beleive this stamp shown is wonderful.

@John Becker
You got 2 and 3 wrong.
This issue was printed on the spider press with plates containing 2 "Post Office panes" of 100 stamps. The perforation was done on a single line perforator, but a full sheet would not have fit.

Hence the sequence was:
1. Print the sheets. At this stage, we have an oversized sheet containing 2 panes.
2. Cut the sheets into two panes through the middle of the sheet. At this stage we have 2 slightly oversized panes of 100 stamps
3. Send each pane of 100 through the perforator twice, once in each direction. The perforator also trimmed the panes at the sides. Ultimately we have two perforated "Post office" panes.

Now as to how we got to this messy stamp is anyones's guess. Sheets were usually sent through the line perforators one at a time so such two-way misperforations and miscuts would not happen
.
My best guess is that:
2.Cutting the sheets happened on a stack of several sheets. As the sheets had some randomness in the position of the stamps when going through the spider press, stamp positions in a stack were not precisely on top of each other. This leads to miscut panes in the end, which may or may not have been removed as printer's waste eventually.
3. Perforation of the cut sheets usually happened on a pane by pane basis. While the ladies were pretty good at feeding a sheet into the perforator, some randomness would have lead to misperforations and miscuts. Again in this example, the vertical misperforation is pretty gross so this sheet would have been rendered printer's waste. The line perforators would also trim the oversized panes down to "Post Office sized panes" by removing excessive side margin paper.

However, it is possible that the ladies tried to use several panes at once and ran a small stack of panes through the line perforator twice, once for each direction (this lead to all kinds of problems as the sheets were agressively pulled into the perforator which works well with one sheet at a time, but not really with multiple panes on top of each other due to possible paper slippage). So a misaligned pane inside a stack could be misperforated and miscut at the same time and pass unnoticed.

Still final examination should have removed the pane the "bad" pictured stamp came from and put it onto the printer's waste pile (my guess is waste accounted for a pretty good percentage of all final PO sheets). Why it wasn't remains anyone's guess.

It's a dry print, and poorly centered. I can understand a specialist finding it a useful item to have, but I suspect that examples like this one are a part of the reason that this issue was very poorly received at the time.

I will stand corrected on the order of 2 and 3, although it does not change the overall idea that cutting into panes and perforating are two separate steps.

Also it makes sense that they would have had several perforating machines - one set for height and one set for wdith, at a minimum.

All true except that I also said:




Context is everything and what issue we are dealing with is key.

drk - I doubt they perfed multiple sheets at a time.

Maybe no, maybe yes. As far as I read, they tried and did it with the grill stamps by passing multiple sheets through an (assumed modified) spider press to apply the grills. So the idea of using more than one pane is not that far fetched (it does speed up the perf process considerably). What was the probabiliy that the "perf lady" would rotate a badly miscut and misperfed sheet for the second perf run and not put it onto the waste stack instead? We will never know..

Please excuse the intrusion of a beginner into expert discussion. This is fascinating but quite complicated, so let's see if I've understood.

1. The sheet of 200 is printed. (revcollector says it's a dry print, which is interesting as a separate question.)

2. The sheet of 200 is guillotined into two panes of 100 as part of a batch. This sheet is accidentally misplaced in relation to the other sheets in the batch, giving the misplaced straight edge at the right of the left-hand pane (and a corresponding misplaced straight edge at the left of the right-hand pane, possibly detected and discarded).

3A. The left-hand pane is put through the perforator, lined up neatly against the right hand side of the machine, and the misplaced straight edge contributes to the perforation error.

3B. It's then put through the perforator again sideways, lined up not so neatly, so the other part of the perforation error is random.

(But 3A and 3B may be the other way round.)

Is that right?

If so, it just about makes sense to my admittedly elderly brain.

I have to correct myself and John Becker was right actually.
I have an image of an old line perforator. This is around 1900 I guess, as everything is still belt driven in the old BEP building.

(Due to size limitations of the upload, the image may have suffered in quality.)
But one can still see the lady in the front is feeding a sheet of 200 stamps (2 panes of 10 by 10 stamps) into the perforator. The perforator has a guide mark mounted in the middle so she can exactly feed the sheet centered into the machine.
Notice it is not carnival, the hats protect the ladies from the paper dust and chads flying around. No picture ever shows any further protection against all the dust (face masks) or earplugs (It must have been extremely noisy in a room filled with perforators).

So the sequence for these panes was actually
1. Print the sheet
2. Perforate the sheet
3. Cut the sheet nto two PO panes.

Here's a picture of a later line perforator (ca 1930), perforating a sheet of 400 stamps (4 panes of 10 by 10 stamps). Now electrically driven (in the new BEP building). But still the same mess with paper dust, but no hats this time...