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Stamp Sheets and Their Margins
The number of stamps in a sheet varies to a great extent. The smallest sheets consist of four stamps. Such small sheets are usually printed on flat-bed presses. When using a rotary press, it would be uneconomical to have just one sheet of one hundred stamps on a cylinder. This would mean that neither the surface of the cylinder, the capacity of the rotary press nor the surface of the paper roll would be used to the fullest extent. That is the reason that, when larger sheets are printed, they are referred to as printer’s sheets.
A printer’s sheet might be composed of four post-office sheets or panes of one hundred stamps each, with the stamps arranged ten by ten in each pane. The printer’s sheets are separated at the printer’s and reach the post office as individual panes of 100 stamps each. Sometimes, unseparated printer’s sheets reach the post offices. When marginal stamps of two adjacent panes are taken off the sheets together with the white space between them, they are called gutter pairs. During the period 1891 – 1927, post offices in France received stamp sheets consisting of two halves of 150 stamps each. Between the two halves of the sheet was a white gutter with the year of printing on it. French specialists call such gutter pairs with the date milliseme.
Philatelists are always on the look out for gutter pairs. In most cases, the margins of stamp sheets are clean. According to need, in some countries all sorts of information, instructions and figures were printed on stamp margins. The margins of the Penny Blacks bore instructions on how to use the stamps. Another example of what can be found on sheet margins is a plate number. British stamps of 1880, for instance, always had a large letter denoting the plate number under the last but one stamp in the bottom right hand corner. Issues of 1911 – 1913 had the plate number on the left hand side. It consisted of a letter with a number underneath. Czechoslovak stamps of the pre-war period always had a plate number at the foot of the bottom left hand corner stamp.
Quite a number of other countries followed the example of the first British stamps and put the sheet margins to good use. As far back as the classical period, advertisements were in use; the stamp printer’s printed their name on the margin. In many cases, a decorative design was also added. To ease the work of post office clerks in Germany, numerators were printed on sheet margins. Above the top row of stamps, there was a number giving the value of a complete row of vertical stamps. This made it easier to count the stamps left on a part sheet and calculate the value.
A number of postal administrations sold the margin space for publicity purposes. There are sheet margins with publicity texts for a selection of commercial firms. Stamps with such texts in the margins are a welcome addition to specialized collections. Stamps of Ghana with an image of American President John F Kennedy, have the plate number printed on the lower edge in the three colours used in the actual stamp. Italy, Turkey and Ruanda-Urundi have all issued stamps with printing and text on the margins. The United States of America issued stamps portraying physical fitness which incorporated a cartoon in the lower left hand corners promoting the Zip Code.
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