Canada Stamp 90 Wet vs Dry Printing Edward 2¢

john - John

Unitrade 2022-23, page 31:

Wet and Dry printing: early Canadian stamps were printed on dampened paper. Shrinkage across the grain would occur as the paper dried.
Beginning in 1922, a new process was used to print  stamps on dry, pregummed paper. These did not shrink, resulting in stamps half a mm (millimetre) wider than previous.

John, put a wet printed stamp over a dry printed one, and you will notice the difference.

René

Unitrade Canada Cat refers to width of the dry vs wet stamps and I do have some Type 1s and 2s - Unitrade did not do a good job explaining the differences, I think.

René

If you ever come across a damaged stamp that you're willing to throw in the bin, you can use scissors to cut them along the width direction.  This gives you a quick & easy template - you can just lay the cut stamp directly over top of your good stamps to compare widths (you can most likely get a more accurate comparison by using a cut template than you can when the frame margin and perforations are still intact).  Of course, you need to know whether your cut template is a wet or dry print, but if you have enough stamps and if the two printing types are both relatively common, you will eventually figure out that you have one pile of stamps wider than the other pile.

Here's an example of something similar done for the Admiral series.



Ryan