5¢ Orange Brown (1b), Position 91L with huge bottom left corner sheet margins, both measure approximately 8mm, ample margins at top and right, unusual dry print at left where the sheet of paper likely began to dry before printing (drying from the outside in) and therefore failed to pick up all the ink, deeply blued paper, tied by neat red square grid cancel with matching "New-York Mar. 19" (1851) circular datestamp on envelope to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, docketing at left "Cousin Nellie New York March 12, 1851"

Extremely Fine; some tears on backflap barely nick the edges of the cover.

This is an exceedingly rare on-cover example of the 5¢ 1847 Issue with huge corner sheet margins. For a variety of reasons, very few examples of the 5¢ 1847 Issue with corner sheet margins exist. To begin, only four outer corner positions on the full plate of 200 and four additional positions from the interior columns (separated by a gutter) could produce stamps with corner sheet margins. When the stamps were affixed to letters or envelopes, the sheet margins were often trimmed off, presumably to make the stamp fit on the envelope without covering up the address. Corner-margin stamps surviving from this small original supply are very rare, regardless of condition. Of the handful of truly full-size sheet-margin copies we have located, this is one of only two on cover--the other is the superb bottom left corner-margin example currently in the Gordon Eubanks collection.

Ward backstamp. Ex Paul C. Rohloff, Marc Haas and John R. Boker, Jr.

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