ScottV Stamps

From the 1920s to 1950s, there were a lot of stamps showing factories with huge plumes of pollution.  This was most pronounced from Eastern Europe and Russia after WWII, where the workers were stylized and turned into icons, and industry was rampant. Here is a stamp from Saar (Scott #98) which is depressing every time I see it. The catalog says this is the Burbach Steelworks in Dillingen, Germany.  This stamp is high on my mental list of the ugliest stamps ever printed.  It's dark, low contrast, and badly over-inked.  The design is so bad, in fact, that you can't even read the printed value of 25c at the bottom, and it was almost immediately surcharged "5 FRANKEN". I was also wondering if those were dollar signs in the lower corners. The underlying stamp (#83) is the high value of a long set of blurry, smudgy grey/brown/black images of towns.  Here are some stamps from that set.  These usually have heavy, smudgy postmarks.  As someone who enjoys fin...

Selvage (US English) or Selvedge (British English) is the paper at the edge of sheets of stamps.  You will often see single stamps or blocks with this extra paper attached, and it is usually blank, but there are a lot of markings that can be found in these tiny scraps of extra paper.  Here is a pair of Sudan #35 with brown and blue registration marks and interesting brown bars.  Registration marks are used to make sure the different colored plates are aligned as precisely as possible.  I have worked in high-volume print shops, and remember grabbing a sheet every minute or so and checking the registration.  You would have to run the paper through the press once to print the brown ink, then dismount the brown plate and mount the blue plate, then feed the whole stack of paper back through and apply the blue ink, doing your best to keep everything lined up exactly.  There are many moving parts in an industrial printing press, and the plates do gradually shi...