Hello, Priatel,
Double transfers occurred during the production of printing plates to be used in the intaglio printing process. The plates were made by pressing a stamp design in relief (raised lines) multiple times from a so-called transfer roll onto a plate, creating etched designs which held ink from which the stamps were printed when dampened paper was pressed into the design. Sometimes the raised stamp design was transferred inaccurately into its designated position on the plate; in these cases the inaccurately transferred etched design was erased so that the transfer could be redone. But these erasures were almost always incomplete, leaving traces of the inaccurate transfer that subsequently appeared in the printed stamp. In the following example you can see a clear double transfer in the O of "ONE"--the original transfer was too low (as you can see by the partial "O" lines below the printed letter O), but was not fully erased before being re-entered. The image is from Richard Doporto's Plating Archive, used with permission.
Posted 12/21/2014 06:21 am
