ScottV Stamps

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...

I was just sorting a big mix of Brazil commemoratives, getting them ready to fill up a stack of stockpages. They all have prominent dates in the design, "Brasil 2001" and so on. So as I sort them, they deserve a shout out for making life easy for their collectors. Right after that, I had a pile of Antigua topical sets with no dates, which wastes a lot of our time looking over 6 to 8 pages of catalog entries trying to visually find a match.  Dates are so helpful for collectors trying to organize and locate specific stamps that I am surprised so few countries include them in their designs. Even if they don't care about collectors or convenience, you would think they would all want a date stamp as a kind of copyright notice.  The most detailed year info was always China, which used to have the year at bottom left along with the set number and stamp number within the set, like "69.(4-4)". This is essentially an exact catalog number, as no two would ever be the ...