Call me by your number - 00 a Introduction

Numbers have always been appealing to people.
But for once, the question is not 'how many stamps do you have'... but which numbers do you have.

Collecting different images on stamps, and later discovering errors in those images, is already a very pleasing activity.
But what if it was made 'simple' ... just collecting the numbers appearing on the stamps.

In the beginning, british stamps were printed on numbered plates. Those numbers were however not printed somewhere at the top or the bottom of that sheet, but on the stamps theirselves.

On US stamp sheets, the plate numbers can be found in the border frame of the sheets.

Plate 170, with the name of the printing company

Only stamps with a certain part of the border paper, will reveil the plate number.
You need to be lucky somehow, to find the different plate numbers, as they are not part of the stamp, and might have been thrown away long time ago.

The british stamps however had their plate numers printed ON the stamp itself.
As there were many prints of the same stamps, over the years, identical looking stamps, had possibly different plate numbers.

a red penny - plate 107

Some plates got distroyed, due to failiures, damage, ... so various plate numbers became more rare than others. 

The perforated red penny, was first printed on plate 69, and ended with plate 225.
Plate 69 and 70 however were rejected (not issued), and also 75, 126 and 128 were destroyed.
3 more plates, 226, 227 and 228 were prepared, but never used.
The most notorious plate, plate 77 was also rejected, but some of the printed stamps did manage to come into circulation. Their value is now sky rocketing.

After the black, red and blue pennies, plate numbers restarted from 1 again.
Some of them are very visible, others are more difficult to find, especially on used stamps.

Other examples :

plate 14

plate 22

plate 14

plate 8

plate 18

 

plate 15

plate 1

plate 2

 

plate 13

 

a difficult one ... plate 13

to be continued...