Postage paper
A stamp paper is a specially for the printing of postage stamps produced paper . A postage stamp paper must be of high quality, as it must meet the high technical printing requirements for the brand image, and it must be safe from forgery and indistinguishable from one another in the individual partial editions of an issue. This is not always possible, especially in times of crisis. For printing reasons, the stamp paper is usually gummed before it is printed.
Postage paper types
Over time, numerous different types of paper were created:
Handmade papers
At the beginning of the stamp issues in the individual countries, handmade paper was still used in some cases. These are rougher and vary much more in thickness compared to machine made paper. This hand-made paper was therefore soon replaced by machine-made, satined paper.
In Austria , for example, hand-made paper was used between 1850 and 1854. You will find numerous peculiarities in this edition such as squared or cloudy paper.
Forgery-proof papers
Over time, people began to think more and more about the forgery-proof paper. Numerous types of postage stamp paper have been developed to protect against counterfeiting. The most important are:
- Watermark Paper : Watermarks are the oldest method of preventing counterfeiting to the detriment of postal services, and it was used on the world's first postage stamps .
- Fiber paper : With fiber paper, flakes of silk thread (often of different colors) are added to the paper pulp, which later become visible in the paper. Such fiber paper is very often found in older postage stamp issues.
- Silk thread: With some stamp issues a colored silk thread was embedded in the still wet paper pulp . These protective measures can be found, for example, in the stamp issues of the German states of Bavaria and Württemberg as well as in Switzerland .
- Colored papers: Colored papers should also make counterfeiting more difficult. If the paper is only colored on the front side, it is called colored paper. Such protective measures can be found, for example, on Bavaria's first postage stamps.
Nowadays these protective measures of the paper are no longer used.
Fine papers
For issues of stamps for special occasions or for stamp block often was better, nobler paper used as for the ordinary postal stamps . These special types of paper include:
The glossy chalk paper is often found in normal postage stamp issues. For some years now, postage stamps in Germany have only been produced using offset printing on coated paper.
Temporary papers
In times of need, unusual types of paper were often used. The paper quality is often poor at such times. In Latvia , for example, from 1918 to 1920 postage stamps were printed on the back of maps and unfinished sheets of banknotes or on lined writing paper.
Modern stamp paper
Nowadays, stamp paper with a luminescent body is mostly used . A distinction is made between fluorescent , phosphorescent and postage stamp papers with optical brighteners .
Variants of the postage stamp paper
Philatelists distinguish stamp papers of many editions different varieties such different directions of ribbing or striation of the paper, its color, thickness or smoothness, the presence of fluorescence or phosphorescence, but also contingencies of the manufacturing process such as paper wrinkles.
proof
- ↑ Great Britain . In: Michel Catalog North and North West Europe . Schwaneberger Verlag, Munich 2002/2003, ISBN 3878586655 , p. 579.
- ↑ Latvia . In: Michel Catalog North and North West Europe . Schwaneberger Verlag, Munich 2002/2003, ISBN 3878586655 , p. 1104.