Prior to the 1920s when the Rotary Press could produce infinitely long rolls of coil stamps, stamps were printed using the Flat Plate press which typically printed sheets of up to 400 stamps maximum, 20 rows by 20 columns. To produce full coil rolls of 100 to 1000 stamps, multiple sheets were pasted together at the edges, cut into long strips, and rolled into coils to sell to consumers.
At each join, a small tab from the edge of one sheet overlaps (or underlaps) the next sheet. A pair of stamps that straddles this join is a paste-up pair. A paste-up pair might occur once every 20 stamps, like a line pair, but paste-up pairs are not listed and priced in most catalogs so they are not as popular.
The most sought after paste up pairs are the ones where the plate number or other margin inscriptions are included in the paste-up tab.
Coil singles with the plate number attached are also prized by plate-number-single collectors because they are scarce and normally torn off when the stamps are separated. Here is one of mine, this might be considered to be "half" of a paste-up pair. The other half of the pair would have been the adjacent stamp that was 'glued' on top of the plate number tab at the right.
Posted 03/12/2025 09:21 am
