|
coil stamps - Have a look at the two stamps below. What is the main difference between them?
 Notice that the stamp on the right has no perforations along the top or bottom edges. Have you ever seen stamps like this? They are called "coil stamps", and they come in long rolls. Because they are connected only to stamps in the strip, they do not need perforations on the other edges. Generally, the size of the perfs are different from the stamps like them that are made in sheets (the stamp on the left came from a sheet, didn't it!). Since it is easier to tear off a stamp from a strip, the perfs are larger and there are fewer of them. Now, have a look at these examples. Same stamp? Yes!! Coil strips? Yes! But one is a "vertical coil" and the other is a "horizontal coil". booklet pane - Years ago, some stamps were sold in little "booklets", even with a cover on the booklet. When you opened the cover, you saw a small sheet of perhaps 6 stamps. There might have been several of these small sheets. Each small sheet was called a "pane". Ask an adult what a pane of glass is, then try to figure out why the small sheets were called that! Here is an example of a 6-stamp pane. Here is an example of a 4-stamp pane. Sheets usually have a strip of blank paper around the edge. Long ago, the Post Office also printed some information along the outside edges. This could be the name of the printing company that printed the stamps. It could be the number of the "plate" that was used to print the stamps. All of this stuff can interest collectors. perfins - What an odd name! What it means is that there are perforations "in" the stamp that usually spell out a word or some initials. For example, stamps used by the Government of Canada once had the initials O.H.M.S. punched into the stamp. This stood for: "On His (or Her) Majesty's Service".
 See the OHMS holes? Here are 15 smaller stamps with OHMS viewed from the back Did you notice that the letters seen from the back, are backwards! Those last stamps didn't look so healthy, did they! They were used on a big parcel and have lots of wrinkles. But don't worry too much about that if you like the stamps. mourning cover - If you collect covers, you might see one sometime that has a black strip all around its edges. This was used to announce someone's death and was called a "mourning cover". This is just one of several kinds of interesting covers that people collect. hairline - When they used metal plates in the printing of stamps, tiny cracks occasionally appeared in a plate. These resulted in lines in the image of the stamp that could be seen with a magnifying glass. Unless the plate was repaired, these lines appeared in all the sheets printed after the cracks formed. proof - Printers of stamps often tested their plates by printing sheets that were never intended for postage. Sometimes, these were to demonstrate the stamps to the governments that were having them made. A proof made from a single image on a "die" is called a "die proof". Proofs made in whole sheets are often called "plate proofs". These were made in the colour of the final product used for postage. EXAMPLES Some proofs were made in other colours, to demonstrate what those colours would look like. These are called Trial Colour proofs. Many of the proofs, of all colours, were overprinted with the word 'specimen', displayed horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. EXAMPLES Canadian proofs, such as shown, were printed on "India" paper and mounted on light cardboard. re-entry - After being used for a while, some of the plates used to print stamps would wear or become cracked. Printers sometimes tried to repair them by impressing them with the original die. If this was not done accurately, double or more lines would result in the printed stamps. These are called re-entries. Large changes of this kind are called "major re-entries". Re-entries are often used to locate the exact position of a stamp in the original sheet. MORE TO COME !!!!!!! return to Main Page return to Teens Page return to Pre-teens Page |
