Plating The 3¢ U.S. Imperforate Stamp of 1851 - 1857


Recognition and Acknowledgments:

Robin Lund

Of course, acknowlegements MUST begin with Rob Lund and his Complete Plating of the 3¢ U.S. Imperforate Stamp of 1851 - 1857. Without Rob's incredible achievement, there was nothing for me to work with. Thank you Rob for being so supportive and answering all my questions.

The Platers

Platers who have achieved the complete plating of this issue are few. They deserve our recognition and honor. My "educated guess" of those who have achieved the complete plating include the following:

Robert J. Lampert

Bob Lampert began mentoring me early in my journey with this stamp. He has been my valued sounding board during this process of turning spreadsheets into a web site. Bob's insight into the wide world of plating and his willingness to share everything he saw with nothing held back was appreciated more than he likely knows. I have enjoyed immensely our long phone conversations over the gory details of all the data table worksheets. Bob is also an expert on color and really sped up my learning curve on many issues. Thanks Bob for being there to support me!

Richard C. Celler

Dick Celler passed away in 2021 from cancer. He was a treasured resource and always responded within hours to every single one of my novice emails with valuable information that helped me learn. Dick stands high above as the Grand Master of all things plating. Thanks Dick for all your expertise on display for all of us.

Dr. Carroll Chase

A 374 page book on a single stamp? What's that all about? That is what got me hooked on this plating thing when I returned to stamps after too many years. Sure, I was tackling my U.S. Classics collection; but, working on this massive jigsaw puzzle hit all my buttons. It had order, analysis, art, history, potential completion, reasonable rarity, and would not be an entire waste of time. It provided me a practical reason to learn how to build a web site. This is a great hobby! How the stars aligned when Dr. Chase was ill and trying to fill his time with this stamp must be a very interesting story. But, this whole thing really appealed to me. Thank you Dr. Carroll Chase for starting it all.

DeVere Card, Mark Friedman, David Watt, Bill Amonette, Dick Celler (Again) and others

DeVere Card, Mark Friedman, David Watt, Dick Celler, Bill Amonnette, and others I am sure, stewed over the notion of Plating Systems for years. I have seen the correspondence about "computerizing the process." With today's technology, once the work of evaluating each stamp is done, presenting the results is easy to achieve. I believe the real value of this web site will be version 2.0, which will launch the first solutions to the "ADDITIONAL ANALYSIS" goals of this web site. All of the aforementioned have great ideas for different ways to look at these stamps and help platers plate them faster and easier. All of their ideas are readily transferable to this web site. It just takes more hours of heavy lifting to get the job done. I intend to begin that during 2018; but, I wanted to launch this "Version 1.0" to show the beginnings of a process of growth. Thanks all!

Richard Celler (One more time) and Elliot Omiya

Dick and Elliot's work on reliefs is just amazing. I have read their articles many times and each time something new sticks. Thank you for doing this research and explaining it so well.

The U.S. Philatelic Classics Society, American Philatelic Research Library, and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum

I relied heavily on many resources from the USPCS, rare information from APRL, and the Chase Photos from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Hopefully, I have done them all some justice with this educational study of the 3¢ imperforate stamp. Thank you very much for your resources. Links to these amazing organizations are below:

About Me

June 2015, I returned to stamps after a 42 year hiatus. After plowing through my long untouched storage boxes, stamps stuck again - and with a passion. The online auctions and research resources, nonexistent in 1973, had a lot to do with that. In the Fall of 2016 I got very interested in the 3¢ plating and wanted to learn to program a web site as well as see how far I could take my excel worksheets with the data. Here it is. Other than that, I am an aging baby boomer, ex-rock drummer, ex-CPA, active small business owner, husband/father/grandfather, and now classic U.S. stamp guy living on the Oregon Coast during the Spring-Summer-Fall and San Jose del Cabo during the Winter.