Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Distinguishing German AM Post Printings

There are three printings of the AM post stamps, which can be really hard to tell apart. The Scott catalog is not very helpful in this regard. I found this public domain image on the German Wikipedia page that makes identifying these printings rather easy.




The stamp on the left is the British/London printing. Scott lists these as the b-versions of the Germany catalog numbers: 3N2b through 3N8b. They were the second printing, and are easily distinguished by the smaller perforations - roughly perf. 14. There is a little circle on this image highlighting another printing difference. For some stamps, the lines on frame are a series of dots. But, this is not needed to positively identify these London printings.

The other two stamps both have perfs. of approximately 11. There's enough overlap, that the perforations are not a good way to distinguish the printings. Scott lists some color differences between the stamps, but I find those to be too subtle to trust for positive identification. Fortunately, there is a very easy way to tell them apart.

The stamp on the right is the Braunschweig, German printing--the third and final printing. Those stamps have more detail in the scrollwork. You can see white areas in the blue boxes on the image. That extra detail is not included in either the American printing or the British printing.

Finally, by process of elimination, the center stamp is the Washington D.C. printing from the US. It is actually the first printing, although Scott lists these with a-versions of the catalog numbers: 3N2a through 3N13a.

The German printing came last, but has more values in the series. Scott gave them the major catalog numbers--3N1 through 3N20--probably because it includes all the stamps in the series. It made the numbering easier, but not nearly as clear as I'd prefer.

Here's my table of these issues:





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