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Postage Stamps and Tete-e-Beche
In classical stamp times, when the printing plates were grouped together from individual reproductions in metal (called clichés), it sometimes happened that one or more clichés were inverted. Such an inverted stamp, together with a stamp in the normal position on the left, right, top or bottom, form a tete-e-beche. The reason that a French expression was used for such a pair of stamps was that the first tete-e-beche stamps were found in France in sheets of the first stamps issued in 1849; they are very much in demand and highly priced. Especially high prices are paid for blocks of four, six or more with an inverted stamp.
Inverted stamps are seldom found in post office sheets. They are much more frequent in overprints which often had to be produced at short notice. There was not always enough time to check the over-printing plate, and an inverted block could escape notice.
On the other hand, there are tete-e-beche stamps which have not been caused by the printer’s error but were produced on purpose. In 1863, Turkey issued its first stamps. The arrangement of the sheets was most peculiar. A pane of these stamps which were printed by lithography was formed with 144 stamps, twelve rows of twelve stamps each. The first row of stamps was in the normal position; the second row underneath was turned upside down; the third was again in the normal position and so on right to the bottom of the sheet. At the bottom end, the stamps had a much wider margin and so, where the bottom ends of the stamp rows met, a wide space appeared going right across the width of the sheet. On this space, a coloured control band was printed in red or blue with the Turkish text in Arabic script: Ministry of Finance of the Sublime Government. A vertical pair or block of four of these stamps must be, therefore, in tete-e-beche arrangement. There were altogether four postage stamps and four postage-due stamps, each of the denominations being twenty paras, one piaster, two piastres and five piastres.
There was also, however, a normal arrangement of the sheets of the two and five piaster postage stamps. They were the first to be printed but, later the tete-e-beche arrangement was adopted and these stamps issued. Only when the supply of stamps ran out was the first printing released for postal use. The space between rows is narrower and the coloured bands usually go into the stamp design.
Tete-e-beche stamps are found in modern times as well, and have also been produced on purpose. When stamp booklets were introduced, stamp sheets had to be printed in special arrangements to have the booklet panes in proper sequence.
In more recent times, stamps not intended for booklets were issued in tete-e-beche arrangement. Usually one stamp in the sheet is in the normal position, the other inverted, and the whole pane is in tessellated arrangement. There was no real necessity to print this way. It was done only to make such stamps more interesting to philatelists and to encourage them to buy more (for instance, part of the issue of a Turkish stamp against alcoholism in 1956).
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