Victoria Queen on throne issue

Does anyone have a scan of the lettering distribution of these? I remember
seeing one in a dealers book once and it was very different from
the Penny Black letterings!

Thanks,
Andrew Walker

Per Robson Lowe.

5 rows of 10:
row 1 - AE, BF, CG, ... IN, KO (J omitted in all cases)
row 2 - LP, MQ, ... UY
row 3 - VZ, WA, XB, YC, XD, AF, BG, ... EK
row 4 - FL, GM, ... PU
row 5 - QV, ... WZ, XA, YB, ZC, WM*
* - said to be the engraver's initials (W. Mason)

I can't make sense out of row 5 (QV to WZ). This part of
the row should accout for 6 positions, but Q to W is 7 and
V to Z is only 5.

Jay Carrigan change domain to mchsi
www.jaypex.com


In article ,
says...


Does anyone have a scan of the lettering distribution of these? I remember
seeing one in a dealers book once and it was very different from
the Penny Black letterings!

Thanks,
Andrew Walker

Thanks for this help to start with. Stanly Gibbon confirms the bottom
left corner as being "FL GM" over "QV RW" which was damaged and substituted
some time in 1854 with "VZ WA" over "FL GM". I can confirm from its text
SX was the third in the bottom row but none of the rest.

Can anyone else help?
(PS www.stampsofvictoria.com has nice pics of these and other
Victorian issues, I'm going to check tonight if it shows any from
the bottom row)

(Jay T. Carrigan) writes:

Per Robson Lowe.

5 rows of 10:
row 1 - AE, BF, CG, ... IN, KO (J omitted in all cases)
row 2 - LP, MQ, ... UY
row 3 - VZ, WA, XB, YC, XD, AF, BG, ... EK
row 4 - FL, GM, ... PU
row 5 - QV, ... WZ, XA, YB, ZC, WM*
* - said to be the engraver's initials (W. Mason)

I can't make sense out of row 5 (QV to WZ). This part of
the row should accout for 6 positions, but Q to W is 7 and
V to Z is only 5.

Jay Carrigan change domain to mchsi
www.jaypex.com


In article ,
says...


Does anyone have a scan of the lettering distribution of these? I remember
seeing one in a dealers book once and it was very different from
the Penny Black letterings!

Thanks,
Andrew Walker

In summary, the lettering looks like this so far, note the
XD in the middle.

AE BF CG DH EI FK GL HM IN KO
LP MQ NR OS PT QU RV SW TX UY
VZ WA XB YC XD AF BG CH DI EK
FL GM HN IO KP LQ MR NS OT PU
QV RW WZ XA YB ZC WM

Andrew Walker writes:

In summary, the lettering looks like this so far, note the
XD in the middle.

AE BF CG DH EI FK GL HM IN KO
LP MQ NR OS PT QU RV SW TX UY
VZ WA XB YC XD AF BG CH DI EK
FL GM HN IO KP LQ MR NS OT PU
QV RW WZ XA YB ZC WM


Following up on this, I sent a query on this issue
to the author of the "Stamps of Victoria" site.
He has kindly put up a page at http://www.stampsofvictoria.com/plating.php
which shows how the last row works.

Enjoy!!

Andrew

Andrew:

A handy chart indeed. However there are several anomolies on the page.

The author writes: "As you can see, the sequence of letters
seen on the left starts with A and proceeds alphabetically to Z
(omitting J) and, then, starts once again. The letters on the
right start with E and proceed alphabetically to Z (again
omitting J) and then restart. Only the 50th, and final, position
on the plate does not fit into this pattern."

In fact, stamps 25, 26 and 45 also break the pattern.

Row three reads V-Z, W-A, X-B, Y-C and then X-D (stamp 25)
[which should be Z-D according to the formula] and then the first
letter increments to A, but instead of A-E we get A-F (stamp 26),
B-G, C-H, D-I, and E-K etc...

The last row reads Q-V, R-W, S-X, T-Y then it reverts to U-X
(stamp 45) before you get to W-Z, X-A, Y-B, Z-C and the final
W-M (stamp 50).

It is probably easier just to say... "Here is the table of corner
letters for the sheet: The fifty positions have the corner letter
combinations as shown in the table below:

A-E, B-F, C-G, D-H, E-I, F-K, G-L, H-M, I-N, K-O,
L-P, M-Q, N-R, O-S, P-T, Q-U, R-V, S-W, T-X, U-Y,
V-Z, W-A, X-B, Y-C, X-D, A-F, B-G, C-H, D-I, E-K,
F-L, G-M, H-N, I-O, K-P, L-Q, M-R, N-S, O-T, P-U,
Q-V, R-W, S-X, T-Y, U-X, W-Z, X-A, Y-B, Z-C, W-M "

Blair