Plate 77

 I have not wanted to get into the microscopic detail of stamps. The Penny Red which replaced the Penny Black is an example.  Millions of these stamps were printed requiring lots of printing plates.  Now plate 77 turned out to be a dud. They printed just one sheet of 240 stamps as the tester and found that most were skewed with badly aligned perforations, however 10 or so stamps were ok and survived after the plate was destroyed. The plate numbers are visible in each stamp in the scrollwork on the leftside.  

These days there is a website database that can help identify these plate numbers. OK I gave it a try. It knows the position of each stamp on the plate and has a zooming feature.  I have one penny red only and turns out, it is from Plate 71.  Close but no cigar, as the latest one from plate 77, was auctioned for a half million pounds some years back.

this is my stamp and the image sent back from the database. You can see the 71 on the left.