The EFO Collector
Auction
Club Business
Honor Roll
Buyers & Sellers of EFO Material
| Click here for a printer friendly version of this essay. | Click here to send a note or comment to John Hotchner. |
42. Straddle-pane miscuts and gutter snipes: Stamps have always been printed in formats larger than the panes issued at the post office. The consequences of something going wrong as sheets were cut into post office panes have been noted in the Errors section, but of lesser importance are freaks that result in only partial stamps from adjoining panes. Early sheets did not have perforations between the panes - only a small imperforate space with a line to guide the cutting. Stamps showing that complete imperf space and part of an adjoining pane are called straddle-pane copies, and have value depending upon the stamp and the degree of the miscut. Later, when perforated margin between panes became the rule, miscuts could go to the edge of the far margin and beyond into the next pane. These are called gutter snipes, and the basic price for "perfs only" from the adjoining pane is 50¢ to $1 per stamp. The price goes up as the size of the stamp from the adjoining pane increases.
Type 42: These "gutter snipes" show perforations, and in the case of the 3¢, a bit of the stamp from the adjoining stamps (Left: Scott 640. Right: Scott 1584).
Type 42: These are examples of straddle-pane miscuts resulting from vertical misperforations. In the 5¢ on the right (Scott 504), the precancelling registered perfectly. On the left, a 9¢ Franklin (Scott 509) miscut.
Type 42: Gutter snipes typically are caused by misregistration of the cutting device or paper foldover. This is an unusual example - an intersheet snipe (Scott 737).
| Previous: Paper folds | Straddle-pane miscuts and gutter snipes | Next: Miscuts with marginal markings |
| Table of Contents | Freaks |