The 1¢ Franklin Plating Archive Top

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Welcome to the 1¢ Franklin Plating Archive

The 1¢ Franklin Plating Archive is an online depository of images, organized by plate number and position. Simply stated, it is an attempt to aid other collectors, researchers or students in identifying, with a high degree of accuracy, which stamp and from what plate and position they might have. The web edition is basically a scaled back version of a set of high resolution photographic images that I hope someday to make available on CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW or what ever the technology ends up being in 3 to 5 years time. Why 5 years you ask? There are 12 plates that produced the Franklin's and each plate has 200 positions or stamps. Additionally, in 1875 the Government created another plate with 100 more positions. That's 2500 stamps I have to locate and photograph. As of February 10th 2012, we currently have archived 1,374 images and have photographed well over 450 items from collections that have been loaned to me. 50% of the total is not bad for 10 years work.

An Important Message from Dr. Carroll Chase.
The following message is an excerpt from Dr. Carroll Chase' book, THE 3¢ STAMP OF THE UNITED STATES 1851-1857 ISSUE. Though he primarily studied the 3¢ issue, his message applies to all students who plate the early classics. Dr. Chase, whom is considered the originator of the art and science of plating says:

“One of the principal reasons for writing this book is to put down such knowledge as I have in black and white. After I die, some one or perhaps more than one is going to continue this work. It would be a shame for the long hours I have put into this study to go to waste. The next man should not start from scratch. The person who takes over should have several qualifications: good eyesight, patience to burn, the love of the stamp and plating ability which may have to be slowly acquired. He must not be a person who jumps to conclusions. Besides it would be preferable that he be young enough so that he can look forward to years of work on the subject. There is no reason why several should not work on the subject at the same time. This is the reason why I have tried to make available what I have done. So here is wishing my successor(s) lots of luck and lots of pleasure”

Dr. Carroll Chase

Important Notes about this Archive.
Be forewarned my casual web surfing philatelist. The 1¢ Franklin is a physically small stamp. The design measuring 1.00 inches (25.4 mm) tall by 0.72 inches (18.5 mm) wide. The images on this website are, in contrast to the real size, quite massively large. The details that need to be seen to correctly plate a 1¢ Franklin are incredibly small and many times very faint. So to enable to reader to actually see the plating mark, the image of the stamp has to be enlarged to a monstrous scale.

Set Your Monitor to at Least 800x600
Last warning my casual web surfing philatelist. The 1¢ Franklin images as I said before, are large. Since the images are huge and have been processed with sharpness and clarity in mind, you most likely will have a slow connection to the internet. That is Murphy's law in action. The pictures will take sometime to download. Don't despair, I will try to include some text for you to read while the images are building up. Also please keep in mind that image sharpness is the key point here. You will come across some images who's color is shifted or just doesn't look dead on. Since nobody in the world has there monitor set the same way twice, I gave up on trying to correctly color balance the film from my large format camera to my scanner and then to my monitor. If the color looks weird or wrong, it probably is. I will over time, locate a calibration chart and correct this but I most likely won't rescan the stamps already photographed.

Download and Print the Image Below
You will need Adobe Acrobat installed. It is a 1.6Mb printable pdf file.

DISCLAIMER and COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Thanks for visiting this site. I hope you learn something new as we are making new discoveries all the time. You, the visitor, have my permission to link to my pages and to share the INFORMATION with others. The images themselves fall under the fair use guidelines established by the United States Congress and Copyright law. Basically contact us before using. I also ask in return that you send me an e-mail if I have made a mistake, or have made some other technical blunder that in my rush to put these pages up would cause the visitor confusion.

Update 11.05.2017