Plating Of Stamps From Around The World

i was talking with a swedish friend who also collect stamps and the subject was plating of danish stamps, and the reasons why swedish people aren't really interested in this area.

due to well preserved archieves/financial books, printing press records and preserved sheets of stamps and an apparent fetish for this area in denmark. we can pretty much plate all our classic stamps.

in sweden there's no way near as much preserved, and the printing techniques are much more simple, making plating virtually impossible.

then we talked about England, and collectors who "plate" their issues. which in my book isn't plating since every stamp has letters and it's just a matter of finding the right combinations.

and then we thought, is there really any stamp issueing country which you can plate besides Denmark?

since I don't know much about anything outside scandinavia, I thought this was the place to ask

Not a plate collector, but I think you may not understand the complexity of plating GB line-engraved issues and the amount of work that went into doing so.

Do explain and enlighten me.

Hi Sorsh,

America has quite a few 'platers', just a couple of examples...
http://stampsmarter.com/features/SQ...Plating.html
http://stampsmarter.com/features/SQ...Plating.html

Canada has some but not quite as many, an example...
http://stampsmarter.com/features/Ca...ateHome.html

Don

Thanks Studerbaker

do you have any idea as to how they came this far on the project?

I'll let someone who actually plates the line-engraved do that. In the meantime,

http://pennyreds.co.uk/Tips-for-platers

Plating is quite common for many countries.

If you look for it, you can find specialist literature about it.

Besides the classics, you can also find literature about plating various semi-modern overprinted stamps.
(in some instances, it is the only sure way to know if it is a forgery or genuine)

The lion (tiger) stamps of Afghanistan come to mind. Plating in a way isn't that difficult because each image on the plate was individually engraved so differences abound, but finding the stamps isn't trivial. Panes do exist for (many) of these issues. There have been some notable auctions of Afghanistan that show plated examples: try a Google search on "Afghanistan stamps plate" and switch to image view.

Plating is also done to positively identify classic stamps (typically engraved ones) as genuine. Early Japan stamps are a case in point. These are the earliest issues, the dragon and cherry blossom issues (aka "hand-etched" issues). Now there are general characteristics than can separate real from fake. In this case, there were forgeries made early on by the same process, with most of them easily identified and a few hard to identify except by plating. It works the other way around too, where there are a few positions without normal key characteristics but that can be determined as genuine by plating.

I think what Sorsh was trying too say is the entire countries issues.That
means 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14....and so on.

The first three issues of the Netherlands have been plated. Each plate issued has a book that has photographic enlargements of each stamp in it. Plating an issue is very satisfying


Peter

no, no, just a curious discussion we had.

for instance, every 4RBS from denmark is unique and because of preserved sheets, copies of them, and reconstructions based on watermark, blocks and strips a positive rekonstruction could be made.

same goes for every stamp issued from then and upwards, as printing techniques improved, there became less variations.

danish bicolored is divided into maingroups 1-5, each maingroup will have some matrice flaws, and because the oval is printed afterwards, the ovals also have matrice flaws.
because we know the perforation machines used, we can identify vertical perforation rows and narrow down to 10 possible postions, then matriceflaws along with frameflaws and ovalflaws you can pretty much place every stamp in a print and a position.

but icelandic ovals, is for the most part single color and made from blocks of 25 - same perforation machines so you can identify rows, but since they are identical you can "only" narrow them down to 2 possible positions (unless they are from horizontal top or bottom row)... and that's annoying.

swedish stamps are even worse, since they apparently are made from blocks of 10, so 10 identical stamps in each sheet (ringtype), and perforation machines aren't known to be a tool?

for those countries that people have listed here... is it possible to correctly position every single stamp?.

i agree completely, plating takes stamp collecting a step further, which requires extensive understanding of printing techniques and many other niches.

The first, 1850, issues of Spain have long been plated. Each value was printed in sheets using a repeated report block. The 6c is very popular to reconstruct these report blocks. Type I has 24 different types, and type II has 48. There is literature that describes each type, or position, making it fairly easy to complete these report blocks.

The challenge in these has been to complete a reconstruction using various colored, and harder to find cancels, which magnifies the difficulty exponentially.

The other values in the set can also be plated in such a way, but are not as popular because of the expense involved in obtaining platable copies.

Also, since they can be identified by position, distinguishing them as genuine is made easier.

Here is a Soler y Llach auction showing reconstructions of the first issue, using various cancels. Some of these would be VERY difficult to duplicate.
https://stampauctionnetwork.com/so/so7041.cfm#2

@ Spain.

are those printed in sheets of 24? or would those report blocks simply be copied over a sheet?

Sorsh, yes, they would have been repeated, either in full or partial, creating a full sheet of 255 stamps.

There have been several different thoughts on how exactly the report blocks were arranged to create a full sheet, but there is a generally accepted way today. Problem is there are no known full sheets that have survived, that I have ever heard about.