Beginning with the first stamps in 1847, and continuing throughout the classic period, United States stamps were engraved. The plates from which they were printed generally had two panes, a left and right pane. After printing a full sheet of stamps, the sheet was cut down the middle to produce two panes of stamps which were provided to post offices. While each individual stamp appears to be the same, there are small differences in each stamp created by the process of entering each position on the plate from a hardened die. “Plating” refers to locating and cataloging the slight differences in each position and using those differences to determine which position a particular stamp is located on the sheet. Positions are numbered from the upper left, left to right, top to bottom, similar to the days in a calendar.
Consider a sheet with 100 stamps in ten rows. The first stamp in the second row would be position 11. The left half of the sheet (the left pane) would be identified by ‘L’ and the right half by an ‘R’. Finally, if stamps were printed from multiple plates, the numeric identifier of the plate from which a stamp is placed at the end. So the third stamp in the fourth row of the right pane of the first plate used would be 33R1. In some cases a plate would be reworked. So the full identifier would end ‘E’ for early, ‘i’ for intermediate or ‘L’ for late, i.e., 33R1L, if this stamp was from the late state of plate 1.
Platers of the 3¢ U.S. Imperforate Stamp of 1851 – 1857 have long discussed the need for a computerized database-driven environment to help them plate the 2,600 positions of this stamp. StampPlating.com addresses that need. With tens of thousands of images, data cells and individual web pages, this internet-based study of the complete plating of the 3¢ U.S. Imperforate Stamp of 1851-1857 provides the tools to help plate this stamp. J. Bryan O’Doherty (RA #4569) built StampPlating.com during 2017-2018. Like many collectors, Bryan returned to stamps in 2015 after a 42 year hiatus. After discovering the 3¢ plating in the Fall of 2016, building this web site became a passion.
