Bow watermark
As a sheet watermarks called philatelists a watermark extending over the entire used to stamp sheet of printing paper, or repeated a few times. As a result , only parts of the watermark are omitted for the individual postage stamps, and stamps sometimes remain completely without watermarks .
Watermarks on postage stamps
The use of watermarked paper for printing postage stamps is a counterfeit protection measure that was introduced in Great Britain as early as 1840 for the world's first postage stamp, the One Penny Black , and then for numerous worldwide Postage stamp issues was used. The forms and types of watermarks used are correspondingly diverse. Since similar brands often appear with and without or with different watermarks, and there are also different watermark settings for the same watermark depending on the position of the sheet of paper during printing, the exact determination of the watermarks is an important criterion for the philatelist when evaluating his collector's items. It is not uncommon for different watermarks to result in significant price differences for otherwise identical brands.
Types of watermarks
After distributing the watermark on the sheet of paper, and thus also on the stamp, philatelists differentiate between single, multiple, multiple and sheet watermarks.
If the watermark motif appears completely and alone on each stamp, one speaks of an individual watermark. With multiple watermarks, the motif is distributed over the stamp sheet in such a way that it usually appears once on each stamp. In addition, there are always parts of the neighboring watermarks. If the distribution on the sheet is so frequent that the individual motif appears several times on each stamp, one speaks of a multiple watermark. These watermarks mostly consist of simple, regularly repeating shapes (lines, circles, diamonds, waffles, honeycombs, etc.) of small size. Such watermarks are sometimes also called surface or parquet watermarks.
The sheet edge watermark is a special form and can only be found on the edge of the printed sheet, but not on the individual stamps.
Bow watermarks and examples
The sheet watermark uses a motif that covers a larger area and occurs once or several times on the sheet of paper. The distribution on the sheet is such that the individual mark only has parts of the complete watermark. There is also the possibility that individual brands remain completely without watermarks. These brands in particular are often among the particularly sought-after values of an issue.
Bow watermarks were used, for example, in the production of the stamp edition ( coat of arms edition ) published in Austria in 1850 . The letters KKHM (Kaiserl.-Königl. Trade Ministry) were inserted as watermarks in the middle of the print sheet, not all brands were affected. In the stamp issue published in the Kingdom of Romania in 1900 , a motif of the national coat of arms that spanned over 25 stamp fields was used. In the Swedish stamp issues between 1911 and 1925, paper was used which, in addition to wavy lines on two rows of the sheet (20 stamps), had the words KUNGL. POSTVERKET as a watermark. This resulted in brands only with wavy lines, with wavy lines and letters and - especially wanted - only with letters as watermarks.
Paper with sheet watermarks is not only used in the production of postage stamps, but also in the printing of banknotes . An example of this is the first time in October 1944 in Aachen issued banknotes of the Allied military authorities with a bow watermark "Allied Military Authority".
literature
- Wolfram Grallert: Lexicon of Philately. 2nd edition, Phil * Creativ GmbH, Schwalmtal 2007, ISBN 3-9321-9838-7
