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Steve View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Steve Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Authenticity
    Posted: 02 November 2014 at 10:19
When it comes to creating fantasy stamps a lot of work can go into the design and printing. Here is one of the latest Discworld stamps. It is the first stamp issued for postal services for The Chalk.


For those unaware, this is a fedal and rural area of Discworld, notd for its sheep farming on the chalk downs. The people are a bit insular, and not well read, and so haven't needed a stamp issue till the coming of the railway nearby.
The stamp's woodcut design is very appropriate. The colour represents the grasslands. The colour shading across the sheet is variable, suggesting printing done in a barn. The higgledy lettering is perhaps a bit OTT, but overall the look has one of authenticity for such a community - apart from one thing. Nice neat round perforations. Would this have been better straight cut with scissors or rouletted? If perforated, should these have been a bit ragged?

Perhaps it illustrates that despite everything else, when you only have one perforating machine everything will come out identical.
I'm posting this up here for an audience wider than the Discworld collectors, to find out if other Cinderella collectors think authenticity is essential or just nice to have.
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Artypharty View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Artypharty Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02 November 2014 at 11:14
Personally, I like perforations because it 'suggests' a stamp. I really dislike straight cut with scissors, even with vintage 'real' stamps. I don't know what roulette is, but if they're 'torn' that would have worked for me.

Pretty stamps though
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Steve Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02 November 2014 at 11:51
Originally posted by Artypharty Artypharty wrote:

I don't know what roulette is, but if they're 'torn' that would have worked for me.


Roulette would have a torn appearance.

But also its an available technology consideration. Paper can be roulette perforated with a simple hand-held tool. Actual perforations require more complicated technology.
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Steve Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02 November 2014 at 12:33
Here's a roulette perforated stamp. A series of straight cuts along each edge.



Both sawtooth and wavy roulette cuts have been used on real life stamps.
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02 November 2014 at 21:10
This is an interesting point Steve.

I see the problem here as not so much a simple choice of perforation but more whether it is possible to mass-produce cinderellas and consistently maintain the standard of craft that is possible with smaller batch production.

Rouletting would have involved much more handwork at the finishing stage. It is more time-consuming and the profits would be much lower.

For anyone creating their cinderellas for fun in their spare time this would be a no-brainer but for a business that relies on quick turnover to pay their staff and overheads it makes much more sense to stick with the technology they are familiar with.  Get this month's product out, feed the faithful and get their money in. (If that sounds cynical then I apologise, but it strikes me as no coindidence that their stamps are issued to coincide with pay-day for most of us every month!)  What i suppose I am trying to say is that they ARE a business.

If the goal was authenticity then printing the Chalk stamp on a 2014 standard digital press would never have been a consideration, and neither would the modern paper that is no different from all the other stamps produced for Discworld (a world supposedly existing in the equivalent of our Victorian age).  Surely a single colour printing of a well diluted ink would provide the patchy ink coverage, and a rustic, textured, off white paper perhaps with a smeary hand-applied glue backing, would give the impression of a low-tech economy. 

I have looked at the website for these stamps and the makers say that this time they have made an active effort to think about how these stamps would have been used in 'real' circulation. The artwork reflects a simpler lifestyle and lower artistic expectation; it is a low-value stamp because of the prevailing poverty amongst the inidgenous peple; that there are fewer on a sheet because the area they refer to would not send many letters being mostly illiterate.

In my experience people do not actually respond this way.  Can you imagine how a population would react being given postage stamps that not only made them LOOK backwards amongst themselves, but also reinforced this impression every time they sent a letter? There would be uproar. In my experience people would choose to be treated in the same way as the people they were sending a letter to, not identifying themselves as illiterate before the letter had even been opened! 

It still seems odd to me that having taken all these things into consideration they still went ahead with printing in modern technology and with modern materials and I agree with Steve that perforation in this case simply adds to the confusion. In 'reality' a postal service would probably have simply overprinted an existing national stamp with the regional name and value and created a working stamp that didn't patronise or offend its users.

If this sounds like a negative response then I apologise and point immediately to the tiny rat stamps, perforated with a pin, by hand and in equally tiny numbers, produced by the same outlet some years ago now which were perfect for their intended application and should be admired.


 
 
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02 November 2014 at 21:32
I once worked for a very well -known high-street design led furniture and retail business and I can tell you that it is much harder for a lower-educated population to read a mixture of upper and lower case hand-drawn lettering than conventional, recognisable, clearly constructed letterforms.  All that text just looks out of pace on a stamp which purports to be designed for ease of recognition.

And the value being printed so relatively small, and against a background of a field also makes it harder to find and recognise.

They would have recognised the sheep though. And the tree.

Perhaps authenticity is too much to ask, once you start questioning 'the magic' it ceases to be fun and I think fun is why most of the collectors of these stamps are buying them and not authenticity as an item of imagined postal history.

One cannot blame the business for tirning the 'fun' element up to 11 at the cost of the few of their buyers who would hope to see these stamps in the context of an authentic local post history.

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Post Options Post Options   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 03 November 2014 at 04:42
I believe that many low-budget stamps issues used rouletting rather than go to the expense of perforation.  It was particularly popular for cinderellas which were sometimes required NOT to look like a stamp.  There are many examples of advertising labels and Strike Posts which are rouletted.

Much depends on the availability of perforation machinery.

For the majority of stamp producing nations there would never be a requirement for the single linear perforations shown on many of the stamps we collect here. 

Most stamps are produced using a 'comb' perforator that creates holes in two directions in one 'pass' with a pre-fixed matrix of pins on a rotating cylindrical bed. Tooling up for these machines is very expensive, not least because if the pins and bed are out of alignment and are broken, the printing of whole issues of nations stamps can be put in jeopardy. For a small run of stamps such as these Chalk ones, nine to a sheet, even allowing for multple sheets being produced on one same time, comb-perforation would be completely out of the question

Linear perforating would be more cost-effective, more rustic less professional possibly, but more appropriate commercially. 




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Post Options Post Options   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 03 November 2014 at 05:04
I'm not as committed a Discworld reader as I am sure others here will be but I recently saw the television films and remember there was a secne where the discovery of perforation was mentioned.

What i wonder is... what kind of technology do they have. How it started has been discussed but how has it progressed since?

For the dull, repetitive act of putting lines of holes in stamps is there a downtrodden underclass that would be given such a task?  Dwarves, golems? Traditionally in our world, the job of perforation was done by women but as Murray points out this process is nowadays fully automated using massive machines.

But what is the situation on the Discworld? Is printing as sophisticated there as it is here, or are they still making it up as they go along as was hinted in the film?






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Post Options Post Options   Quote Steve Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 03 November 2014 at 06:32
Who would have thought one simple stamp would have generated such well thought out and well informed opinion.

For my part, authenticity would have to be of the at-a-glance type. But wouldn't it be good if all apsects did reflect the fictional land and the culture the stamp came from. I do like to retain a modicum of make believe with the Discworld stamps - helps to justify their continued purchase

Discworld has quite a range of technology. The steam engine has been invented and a railway covers half a continent. Printing presses produce books and newspapers. But in a world with many sentient species and a fair degree of magic some technology is quite different from ours. Photography is achieved by imps inside the camera equipped with pen, ink and paper. It is quite possible that repetitive tasks would be done by a particulr species or group.
But overall, DW has had no real industrial revolution - yet.
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Post Options Post Options   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 03 November 2014 at 06:37
The simple fact that the perforations for the Discworld stamps are in millimetres when the world there is in Victorian 'imperial' instantly gives the lie to any idea of authenticity.  I had this pointed out to me by a designer and ever since it rankles.

The holes are 1mm, the gaps between are 1mm. 

Or has the Discworld gone metric recently? 

I would say rouletting would be preferable for all the Discworld stamps, much more in keeping with my view of their technology.

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