Collecting By Engraver

Most of the stamps I have posted on this thread are from my own collection. This is a borrowed image from the internet.

This France revenue stamp is on my want list...so far I haven't found one in my price range.

France PTT (Post,Telegraph and Telephone)required owners of radios to purchase a broadcast permit...once purchased the owner would affix the stamp to the back of the radio as proof of payment.

Issued in 1937
Engraver: Achille Ouvre

A set from the Reupublic of Dahomey issued in 1964
Regional Dances

Scott 185-190

Engraver:Claude Haley




Engraver:Claude Haley




Engraver:Pierre Bequet


Engraver Pierre Bequet



Engraver:Claude Haley


Engraver:Pierre Bequet

This has to be the smallest stamp in my collection!...
Measures approx 1 inch wide or 2.5cm.

Monaco-1951
Scott 283

Engraver: Pierre Gandon

From the Republic of Nigeria
Issued in 1972
A Day at the Races

Engraver:René Quillivic...passed away July 2016 at the age of 92!
Scott 269-260

@GRAPHIS --- those are fantastically colorful. Nice.

I just acquired a 2011 SG Germany catalogue so now I have no excuse for not attacking the album of German engravers that I seem to have accumulated. On my first browse through I found that one of the stamps is from an engraver I hadn't seen before and looking back, she doesn't appear on our index.


This was issued for the 900th anniversary of the Maria Laach and Bursfelde Benedictine Abbeys in 1993. The engraver was Petra Schlumbohm, who I am assuming is a woman as Gibbons has the curious habit of giving the Christian names of female engravers. It was designed by Otto Rohse. SG 2510, Scott 1781.

Re the image of Wolfgang Mauer that I recently uploaded... A philatelic friend advises that the person alongside Wolfgang is his Bundesdruckerei colleague Ansgar Spratte. Apparently he is not an engraver, so this is not a new name to be added to our listings! GLENN

This is a very common stamp as nearly 140 million were produced but in researching it today, I found it has an interesting twist. As we know, engravers had to work in reverse to get the stamp the right way round. This one was also interesting as, to reflect the cream colour of the bridge against the blue of the bay and sky, the stamp has been engraved in negative so that the actual image is made by the paper showing through.


Opening of the Mackinac Bridge, 1958 SG 1109, Scott 1109. Designed by Arnold Copeland. Vignette engraved by Richard M. Bower with lettering by Reuben K. Barrick.

The bridge was opened six months before the official ceremony, apparently to allow deer hunters access to the winter hunting areas. The ceremony was delayed until the following June so that the officials would have better weather. Such a bridge was first envisioned in the 1880s but was not completed until 1957.
The bridge was designed by engineer, David B. Steinman.


Photo from Pinterest

This one is for Graphis.


Monte Cassino by Antoni Boratynski. Designed by Stefan Malecki, Engraved by Boguslaw Brandt SG 1855, Scott 1613. Combined recess typo and photo.

The battle at Monte Cassino in Italy was one of the bloodiest of the second world war. What is not generally known about is the participation by Polish troops from the recently formed Polish People's Army. 55,000 Allies and 20,000 Germans died in the four battles for the hill, topped by Monte Cassino abbey. Over a thousand Polish soldiers are buried there.

What is also little known is that Monte Cassino abbey, founded in 529AD, contained a priceless collection of documents and art. As the Allies drew closer, two German officers, Lt. Col. Julius Schlegel and Capt. Maximillian Becker convinced both the church authorities and their superior officers that the treasures and the monks should be sent to the Vatican for safety.

Using precious German vehicles and petrol and recruited local labour who were paid food and twenty cigarettes a day to build crates, they were ready to move within a week. It took more than a hundred truckloads to achieve this with some of the monks accompanying each shipment. Despite gaining official sanction, the two officers had to continually defend the loads as not everyone shared their views. Fifteen crates of goods apparently did not arrive but were sidetracked and given to Goering for his birthday. Even so, 1400 priceless artifacts were saved including works by El Greco, Titian and Goya.

As the battle developed, allied bombing completely destroyed the monastery in the belief that German troops were using it as a stronghold. They were not, having decided that it was too precious to risk destruction, however, after the abbey was reduced to rubble, the German troops moved in, gaining a vantage point that helped prolong the battles and was partly the reason for the appalling loss of life.


Photo from German Federal Archives via Wikipedia

After the war, the abbey was rebuilt using the original plans, which had survived, and where possible, the original materials.


The rebuilt abbey, Both photos from Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cassino

Love that bridge stamp, jjarmstrong47! Here is another example of a design engraved in negative. Issued in Belgium in 2014 to mark the fact that the Wallonian mines had become a world heritage site. The stamp is engraved by Guillaume Broux.

John...thanks for posting the Monte Cassino stamp, history and photos.
What a tragic story..fortunately the Abbey was rebuilt.

I was reading AKPhilately's blog last night where he was discussing how much engraving on a stamp it takes to make it worth collecting as an engraved stamp. This is something I've thought about a lot as well, as I'm sure many of us here have done, and it is particularly relevant as I source a lot of my stamps online. Not all sellers have high resolution scans and generally I use the catalogues to guide me.

Today I received a shipment of Liechtenstein stamps from the United States which are a perfect example of the issue but which also led me to a small discovery.

Gibbons seem to always use the same order when describing stamps so all of these are listed as "recess and photo". Scott, however list in the order of magnitude, so to speak, so if they say recess and photo, it means there is more recess than photo, and vice versa. They list all these as "photo and engraved".

Anyway, here are some of the stamps that arrived and you can decide what you think, but I'll give my opinion too. All were engraved by Wolfgang Seidel who is a superb engraver but not many of these would make my favourites list.


1991 Princess Marie SG 1019, Scott 967. Designed by Hans Peter Gassner.


1991 Prince Hans Adam II SG 1020, Scott 968. Designed by Hans Peter Gassner.

The only engraving on the faces of these is the hair and his eyebrows. Almost all of the face is photo. To me, this is not really an engraved stamp though I have to concede that the small bit of recess in the hair is an improvement. Engraving has also been used to give texture to the clothing.

Next are the 1990 game birds set designed by Wolfgang Oehry, based on paintings by Benjamin Steck (1902-1981) SG 996-8, Scott 945-7.


Ring-necked Pheasant


Black Grouse


Mallard

These are much better, in my opinion, as there is a reasonable balance between the photo used to give the colours and the engraving used to give texture to the feathers, particularly on the Black Grouse and to the background. It would be interesting to see the engraved portion on its own.



Finally, we go back another year to 1989 for the 150th birth anniversary of Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (composer). SG 954, Scott 903. Although more of the stamp is photo, the most important part, the portrait is almost completely engraved to the extent that it could stand alone.

Each year, there is a little less engraving. Whether or not this is a trend that follows on other stamps, I don't know but as a pensioner who has a limited budget for his hobby. I think that in future I will look more towards the superb issues coming from the Czech Republic, Slovakia or perhaps even China.

As this is a forum rather than just a gallery, I'd be really interested to hear other collectors' opinions.

The postings by jjarmstrong47 and AKPhilately about negative engravings offered what to me was a new insight into the art of engraving.

I suggest that they were probably engraved "normally" and then flipped at some point in pre-production. I attach here the same two stamps, but with their colours inverted and converted to black and white to show what would normally be produced for a finished stamp.

The Belgian stamp works really well in reverse. (Incidentally is it actually engraved, or is it printed by offset in an engraved style? I ask because it would be highly unusual to print a solid background colour by intaglio.)

The USA design works less well, as it looks like a negative and has what resembles a mourning border.






GLENN

Wow, that's a stunning illustration of that Belgian stamp! The solid black background (and the lettering) on the real stamp is printed in a different process, but the structure is hand engraved. I actually bought the yearbook because it promised to shed a light on how this stamp was produced but all we got was a vague "La gravure de Guillaume Broux est exceptionelle en ce cens que c'est la première fois qu'un timbre poste belge est réalisé à partir d'un cliché positif. Alors que le graveur grave normalement les parties noires du dessin, il s'est ici attaqué aux zones négatives - donc les parties blanches."

Or, according to Googletranslate: The engraving of Guillaume Broux is exceptional in that it is the first time that a Belgian postage stamp is realized from a positive cliché. While the engraver normally engraves the black parts of the drawing, it has here attacked negative areas - that is to say the white parts.

But the confusing thing is that on the real stanmp, the white parts are most certainly not engraved, it is basically the black parts of the structure which have been engraved. On Glenn's negative image it is the white bits in the structure which have been engraved.

So it's a bit puzzling but very cleverly done.

While looking for something else, I came across a much better master image of the mining stamp. I have reversed the colours again, but to much better overall effect. The precise method used by the engraver remains unclear to me. GLENN