As a result, the printer reentered the images on the plate and then hardened it. The first plate was not hardened and quickly became worn.
(A brief technical note: there were only four physical plates manufactured. With effectively five plates, that is 1000 collectible stamps from this one original die. Thus, one die created three unique relief images which in turn resulted in 200 identifiable images on the printing plate. In order for there to be sufficient space between stamps for them to be cut when sold, the designs had to be truncated just a little bit, either at the top or bottom or both. The design of the stamp was just a bit too tall for the plate size that the printer’s presses could accommodate. Each pane was ten stamps across by ten rows deep. Postal authorities ordered the stamps to be produced on a plate containing 200 subjects in two panes of 100 stamps each. Transfer roll illustrating a circular relief - reproduced from Skinner’s and Peterson’s book. When the steel is hardened, it becomes the printing plate used to produce the stamps.įigure 3. Next, the relief images on the transfer roll are “rocked” onto a sheet of steel in recess form. Importantly, the three relief images are not identical. As with the die, the transfer roll starts with soft steel that is then hardened. The die, in turn, is used to embed three reversed or “relief” images onto a cylindrical device called a transfer roll (Figure 3). The steel is then heat-treated to harden the steel, creating a die. First, the design is engraved into a piece of “soft” steel in recessed form. The detailed images seen in Figures 1 and 2 were produced using the line engraving, or i ntaglio, printing process. Now join me as I attempt to summarize many hundreds of pages and decades of research about this stamp’s engraving, plate making and production into three paragraphs. For the second series, consider the resource First United States Perforated Stamps – The 1857 Issue by Jon Rose. Its description of plate production is expansive.
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For the 1851 issue, The 1851 Issue of United States Stamps: a Sesquicentennial Retrospective by Hubert Skinner and Charles Peterson is available as a free download, compliments of the US Philatelic Classics Society ( aps.buzz/1851USPCS). When it comes to the specifics of the 1¢ Franklin issues, I recommend two recent books. If you are more of a “hands-on” learner, then come to the APS Summer Seminar and take Wayne Youngblood’s “Stamp Technology” course. Williams, perhaps the most frequently referenced book in my philatelic library. I’ll touch briefly upon the plate manufacturing process, but if you would like a thorough grounding in stamp production, I recommend you start by perusing Fundamentals of Philately by L.N. But it was Ashbrook who first definitively identified the subtleties of the stamp’s design (Figure 2).
Students of the hobby will recognize the names of the early authors who have written about this stamp: Stanley Ashbrook, Carroll Chase, John Luff, Mortimer Neinken, and Jerome Wagshal, among many others. And, as I promised in the March 2020 column, we will see what happens when experts disagree. In this month’s column, I’ll introduce you to this stamp and its varieties and then explore the challenges encountered in expertizing individual stamps. These varieties resulted not only from the design’s complexity, but also from two other factors: the large size of the stamp image and the resultant difficulty in manufacturing the printing plates to accommodate this size. This ornate and complex portrait of Franklin is notable for the seemingly endless varieties that were produced in both imperforate (1851) and perforated (1857) issues.
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