The Penny Black Stamp Store: The Penny Black Stamp

Sunday, 19 June 2011

The Penny Black Stamp

The Penny Black

The stamps were printed in sheets of 240, engraved on steel plates, on gummed paper with a single small crown watermark on each stamp. Eleven different printing plates were used during the life cycle of the Penny Black. Every penny black stamp has letters in the lower two corners. These simply identify what sheet position the stamp occupied. There were 68,158,080 penny blacks issued. The stamps were not perforated, and had to be separated using scissors or a knife. As there was only about 1mm between one stamp and another, it was very easy to stray just a little and cut into the printed design of the stamp. Some 11 plates were used to print the 1d Penny Black, producing over 68 million examples. Only two plates were made for the 2d value. There was a proposal for government versions with the letters 'V R' in the top corners but this was abandoned.

Source: http://postalheritage.org.uk/page/pennyblack

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A Brief History

Before 1st May 1840, posting a letter was a very complicated and expensive affair. It could cost the equivalent of a days wage, and it was charged by how many sheets of paper were used and how far it had to travel. Normally the recipient had to pay the cost.

Sir Roland Hill was responsible for reforming the British postal system, and as part of this a competition was held for the public to design the world’s first adhesive postage stamp. However none of the entries were thought suitable, so instead they used the profile sketch of a then 15 year old Queen Victoria. This image was used on stamps until the end of her reign. Because the Penny Black was the first postage stamp in the world, it did not show a country of origin, and to this day British stamps are the only stamps in the world that do not state what country they are from.

However, the Penny Black only remained in circulation for a year, as it was soon found that it was possible to remove the ink of the red cancellation mark and re-use the stamp, so the Treasury switched to the Penny Red and black cancellation ink.