Postage stamp paper

Paper characteristics

All paper is endowed with certain characteristics by its maker. Depending on the purpose of the paper, the craftsman will choose specific materials and apply certain manufacturing processes to achieve the design objectives. Characteristics such as composition, weight, color, size, watermark, surface finish, opacity, hardness and strength all have to be established before the papermaker can begin his work.

The making of paper can be broken down into three phases; the preparing of the pulp into a suspension of fibers; the forming of the paper on a mould or an endless wire mesh; and lastly the finishing of the paper's surface and drying. From a philatelic interest, it is the second phase, the forming of the paper that yields the most interesting characteristics.

In the first phase of papermaking the characteristics such as its composition, color and weight is determined. Paper has as its chief component, a mat of cellulose fibers. Cellulose is the skeleton structure of plant cells and can be separated from the plant for use in paper. Cellulose has several characteristics that make it desirable for paper, the foremost being its strength when formed into a mat or web. When cellulose fibers come in contact with each other in water, a bond is formed. When water is removed from the adjoining fibers, the bond between the fibers strengthens. Pulp, the collection of individual fibers, may be bleached, especially if the paper is to be dyed a different color or the paper is expected to be white. Since most paper is either printed or written upon, fillers are added to the pulp to fill the pores of the paper and sizing is added to make the fibers water resistant, yet both act as fillers. Unsized paper is blotting paper, making it unsuitable for printing. Fillers and sizing are added to the pulp to absorb the ink quickly, unlike pure cellulose. Fillers can be glues made from animal products, starches from rice or wheat, resins or gums, or minerals such as calcium carbonate, titanium dioxide or kaolin. Mineral fillers are the most common as they are very effective as a filler. When all of these ingredients are assembled, they are suspended in water, which may include a color dye, as the furnish to the second phase of papermaking.

The paper is formed in the second stage of papermaking. With handmade paper, the furnish is stored in a vat and the craftsman uses a mould to strain out enough material to form a sheet of paper. The mould determines the dimensions of the finished sheet and its weight, which ultimately establishes the paper’s thickness. The mould is usually a wire mesh that acts as a strainer such that the furnish is separated out of the water. The water drains off, leaving layers upon layers of fibers or a web of paper on the mould. The texture of the paper is determined by the nature of the mould. Wove paper has a uniform texture while laid paper has a fine-lined texture created by wires that are attached to the wire mesh. If a watermark is part of the paper’s design, it is the mould that creates the watermark, in the same way that the fine lines of laid paper are created. A watermark is a deliberate thinning of the paper by the placing of either wires or metal shapes, called bits, onto the wire mesh of the mould. When the mould is removed from the vat, the water drains causing the pulp to be deposited more between the wires or bits relative to the top of the bits or wires. When the dried paper is held up to a light, the thinner paper will appear lighter in contrast to the thicker paper, thus creating a watermark. Numerous countries have used a variety of designs for their watermarks as a means to prevent forgery of stamps, making the watermark of particular philatelic interest.

In comparison, machine-made paper is made on the Fourdrinier machine by drawing the furnish out of a vat onto an endless wire mesh. The paper, shortly after being drawn from the vat, is usually pressed with a Dandy roll as the mechanism to imprint a watermark onto the paper. Machine-made paper can produce single sheets of paper or one large continuous web of paper that is collected to form large rolls.

One characteristic of machine-made paper is that it creates a direction or an alignment of the fibers, which directly impacts its strength. This is of particular importance when tearing the paper, as one would do to separate a stamp for use. When the tear is aligned with the direction of the fibers, the paper will tear evenly. When the tear is opposed to the direction of the fibers, the paper will tear unevenly, in a jagged line. Handmade paper disperses the fibers in unpredictable directions and therefore yields a paper with the most overall strength. A paper’s strength had an influence on the separation methods used for a stamp. For example, a stronger paper may have needed a higher number of perforations per inch to best facilitate the separation of the stamps. Similarly, many stamps have two different standards of perforation for its length and width to optimize the ease of separation while minimizing the cost of manufacturing.

In the last stage of papermaking, the paper is finished and dried. The finishing of the paper can include the application of a coating that will produce the best effects when printed upon. The coating is a fine layer of special sizing applied to one or both sides of the paper to fill in all of the pores and to smooth out the surface of the paper. A glossy appearance often is a characteristic of coated paper. Once the coating is applied, the paper making process is complete.

Certain postage stamps have been printed on security paper, which is paper that has additional characteristics coated or printed onto the paper to prevent the reuse of the postage stamp and as a means to prevent forgery.

Shrinkage

Shrinkage is a characteristic of paper because of the nature of cellulose fibers. The cellulose fiber is hygroscopic and acts like a sponge when immersed in water. The fibers expand in their width and not in their length. With handmade paper, because there is no direction associated with the fibers, the paper expands and shrinks unevenly in both the length and width of the finished sheet. With machine-made paper, because there is a direction to the fibers, the paper shrinks unevenly, that is, less in its length (in the direction of the fibers) and more in its width (in the direction opposite of the fibers). This characteristic is important to the printer because certain printing techniques required the paper to be dampened prior to printing. As such, when the paper dried, the uneven shrinkage of machine-made paper would produce an image of different proportions than the die that created it.

Watermarks

Watermarks are created in the paper by special pieces of bent wire or bits, either attached to the mould or attached to the Dandy roll of machine-made paper. The watermark is inherently created differently by these two methods. In the case of the mould, the watermark is created by the settling of the fibers on the mould, thus creating the intentional thinning of the paper. In the case of the Dandy Roll, the watermark is pressed into the wet pulp. The papermaker closely adjusts the pressure the Dandy Roll exerts on the paper to ensure a proper impression of the watermark design into the paper. Too little pressure and the watermark may not be detectable.

Philatelically, there are several descriptive terms used to categorize watermarks.

Watermark detection

Watermark detection can be as simple as holding the stamp up to a light or by placing it face down on a black surface. If this does not reveal the watermark there are fluids, electrical devices and ink pads that may reveal the thinning of the paper;

Flaws and Errors

While the words flaws and errors as synonymous, they are used to distinctly describe either a defect in the stamp's paper or when an incorrect paper was used in the printing of the stamp. Flaws describe faults or defects in the paper of the stamp, typical of handling after manufacturing or less frequently during the manufacturing of the paper. Errors describe an incorrect type of paper used to print a stamp, typically the use of watermarked paper when it was not specified for the issue. While a paper fault represents a damaged or defective stamp that devalues its worth, paper errors have the opposite effect and are sought after by collectors.

Flaws

During the manufacturing of paper, flaws can occur in the web. One such flaw is the pinhole. The term is used to designate a small blemish typically characterized by a small hole in the substance of the paper. Pinholes are typical of very thin paper and can be found by holding the stamp up to light.

A rare flaw in paper is when the watermark bit has been improperly repaired on the Dandy roll. Great Britain's Emblems watermark is composed of two roses, one shamrock and one thistle. A defect was created when the Dandy roll was repaired and instead of a thistle bit, a rose bit was added creating the three roses and a shamrock flaw. This flaw is found on Great Britain's 1862 3d (plate 2), 1865-67 3 d (plate 4), 6 d (plates 5 and 6), 9d (plate 4) and 1s (plate 4).

Another paper flaw is a crease. A crease is when the paper becomes an overlapped fold, which subsequently is printed upon. This kind of crease is more of a printing error as it is a paper flaw. Creased stamps can also occur as a result of handling, where it's clear that the stamp has been folded. While the former example is collected by specialists as printing errors, the later simply devalues the stamp.

Another common handling flaw is a tear. The torn stamp is usually complete but the paper is partially ripped. Tearing a piece off of the stamp, however, is how the Afghan postal clerk cancelled a stamp and so this is not a flaw but evidence that the stamp was probably postally used, especially if the stamp is still on the postal matter.

A stamp can be damaged if it is soaked off of a water-soluble colored paper. For numerous occasions, people send greeting cards in envelopes that are on colored paper. The worst offender is the red envelope. If warm water is used in soaking the stamp from the paper of the envelope, the red dye can and does bleed into the stamp's paper, leaving it tinted red. This is not a stamp variety but simply a damaged stamp. Yellow and blue dyes in colored paper bleed into a stamps too.

A thin is created when a stamp is improperly removed from the paper it was attached. Since paper is created by depositing layers of fibers onto each other to form a web, they can be separated by the layers too. When the paper is finished, the outside layers become the strongest layers. Soaking a stamp in water is the usual way of removing it from the postal matter. Water will dissolve the glue used as the adhesive but it also weakens the bonds of the paper's fibers. Just as the removal of water strengthens the bonding between fibers, adding water weakens them. A failed attempt at removing the stamp from other paper typically results in portion of the stamp's paper being left attached to the postal matter. Thins can be created in a variety of ways and all result in a damaged stamp.

Errors

Errors of paper are created when the incorrect paper is used for the stamp's design rather than a papermaking defect. One example of this is when the watermarked paper intended for use with U.S. revenue stamps was used for the $1 Woodrow Wilson stamp (SC#832). The mistake was made sometime between 1950 and 1951 and some 160,000 to 400,000 copies are estimated to have been printed.

Comparative paper terms

When the paper of the stamp is described, stamp catalogs often use words that are relative, such as thick and thin. This is done to describe the variations of the stamp's paper in a particular issue. Thick may be as much as 0.005 inches and thin as little as 0.001 inches, with medium somewhere in between.

Paper can described as being opaque, semi-translucent and semi-transparent. The opacity of the stamp describes the ability of light to shine through the paper. If no light shines through the paper, then it is opaque. If some light passes through, in any amount, the paper is semi-translucent. Transparency describes the ability to see an object through the paper or when the paper is placed over printed letters the ability to see the printing through the paper. If the stamp's design can be seen through the back of the stamp, then it is semi-transparent.

Another comparative set of terms refers to the paper's hardness. Hard, stout hard, and soft have been used to describe the paper. Experts have described the snap of the stamp when flicked as a means to determine if the stamp was printed on hard or soft paper. A sharper snap implied hard paper because the hardness is a characteristic of the amount or kind of sizing used when making the paper.

Porous paper is used to describe paper as absorbent, usually in contrast to less absorbent paper used in the stamps of the same country. Porosity is a characteristic of paper. Wood fibers are hydrophilic or water loving. Sizing is added to paper to create a resistance to water as well as to fill in the gaps between the fibers. Porosity is a measure of how the paper responds to a liquid.

There are several popular stamp collecting terms. On-paper refers to any stamp that is still adhering to another piece of paper. Similarly, off-paper is used to describe a postally used stamp that is no longer adhering to any other kind of paper. Wallpaper is the slang name given to the sheets of stamps that have little or no philatelic or monetary value.

Stamp paper varieties

Philatelically, stamp paper can be partitioned into a few large groups. The first that is typically encountered in the stamp catalogs describes the texture of the paper, such as wove or laid. Many stamps have been printed with these different paper textures. Other groups can be formed as: Colored paper, safety or security paper and coated paper.

In a stamp catalog, a stamp's paper is usually identified at the beginning of the issue. It will also be identified when the paper changes either within the issue or with the next issue. When colored paper is used for the stamp, the ink colors are listed first and then the paper's color is listed next in italics. Sometimes the paper is described as ordinary, which simply means that the common paper of the period was used. Coated paper is usually not listed but may be surmised by the printing process used to print the stamp. For example, photogravure printing yields the best clarity when printed on coated papers.

Security paper gallery

Examples of different security paper used on postage stamps.