Unique Major Printing Error. 1982 “LOVE” Sheet Sc. Significant Blue Inking Flaw Complete Pane of 50 Stamps. 1982 20¢ “LOVE” sheet printed with dramatic blue inking errors. Ten individual stamps in the sheet are fully overprinted with blue ink plus 10 more stamps are partially overprinted along their left side. This sheet contains the only known 1982 “LOVE” stamps with either of these two different blue errors. The significant blue printing flaw covers the sheet’s complete left margin, the 10 stamps in its entire first column and continues into the left side of all 10 stamps in the second column. The remaining three right columns appear as normal. A view from another perspective shows a sheet with ten horizontal strips, each with three different varieties of adjoining stamps. Each of the ten horizontal triptychs contains a combination of three different “LOVE” stamp variations (the blue ink error covering an entire stamp, with the blue ink error continuing onto the left side as the next adjoining stamp, both followed by a normal stamp). The purchaser was well known to its philatelic clerk as an avid stamp collector. At the time, the philatelic section was in a separate room away from the regular window section. When the “LOVE” stamp came in, she showed him this error sheet. He asked her how many she had and she replied that this sheet was the only one they had received. He brought it from this postal clerk friend. Later that same year (1982), we acquired it from him and have kept it ever since. Dramatic printing errors like this one occur on only a few other stamps of the 1980’s era. For example, 1986 22¢ “Navajo Art” stamps Sc. There, black ink (not blue as here) partially covered the margin and one sheet column of the Navajo Art stamps. Unlike here, many Navajo Art error sheets were found when the Navajo Art stamps were issued. No other 20¢ “LOVE” error stamps with either one of these two different blue inking errors have been found in the more than 40 years since 1982 when the “LOVE” stamp was issued. When this “LOVE” sheet (pane) initially printed in a full uncut sheet of 4 panes of 50 stamps each, only the upper left and lower left panes had the possibility of having such a printing error. That is because the two right panes of 50 begin in the middle of the uncut sheet and end on the opposite edge of the paper from where the inking flaw occurred. Other than the one here, no other left pane errors are known. This blue ink printing may have been the cause of other missing color varieties (such as the missing blue or missing yellow ink printings) known of these “LOVE” stamps. It is not unreasonable to assume that when the spreading blue inking problem was discovered by the printers, they shut down the printing presses to fix the cause of the excessive blue ink run. Then when the printers restarted to print, not all of the colors in the press units had been fully adjusted or turned back on. We include scans taken under short-wave length ultraviolet (UV) light. These scans show the “tagging” on this sheet was applied on top of the blue error i. In the printing process after the blue ink flaw was printed. The tagging on top of the error is indicative of the sheet’s authenticity. We note that most of the lower left portion of the sheet is stuck to a glassine sheet protector, while a little of the upper left portion of the sheet is not stuck (at least two complete strips of 3 seem unattached). That was the condition in which we acquired it in 1982. To keep the sheet intact, we have not attempted to separate the unstuck strips from those stuck. We also chose not to soak the stuck stamps off the glassine page which would have created mint no gum error strips. Now, any such determinations can be made by the next owner.
