I’m sure you all celebrated in your own way, because January 10th was an important anniversary for the philatelic community: on 10 January 1840, the Penny Post was formed in the United Kingdom. Certainly, postal services were around for much longer before that date, but the Penny Post made numerous changes to how mail had been previously handled, thus ushering in the modern form of postal service. The biggest revolution was pre-paying postage: like your celphones today, the recipient got billed for receiving a message in the days prior to the Penny Post. The Penny Post inverted the process, placing the expense of postage on the sender. Verifying that the fee had been paid, however, required a stamp. Stamps had been used for verification of tax payment for years, and the process seemed to fit the postal service well. The system was put in place, a way of verifying payment was set…so all they needed then was the stamp.

Printer Perkins, Bacon & Petch acquired the contract to print the new postage, and performed some test printings for the Crown. Artist Henry Corbould produced a drawing of the young Queen Victoria in profile, based on the 1837 Wyon City Medal, a medallion commemorating the newly-crowned Victoria’s first visit to London. Engravers Charles and Frederick Heath had previously produced banknotes with integrated anti-counterfeit features, and used those same features when they produced the first printing plates of 240 stamps per sheet. These, the first modern postage stamps, entered the chronicles of history as the Penny Black.

In addition to the Queen’s profile, in the lower corners of the Penny Black appeared two letters in varying pairs. The letter sequence was repeated identically in each run, thus ‘keying’ each stamp, identifying which portion of the plate it came from in the event of a printing error. The specifics of the design and the fine engraving talents of the Heaths made it difficult to reproduce. Despite the focus on the smallest details, the stamps are remarkably devoid of frills – three words appeared on the Penny Black, “Postage” and “One Penny“. Being first means you don’t have to prove it: the stamp does not indicate the country of origin, and in the century and a half since the Penny Black the standard British postage stamp continues this tradition, only featuring an engraving of the seated regent and the postage price.

Despite the success of the Penny Black’s design, it still needed some fine-tuning. The black ink proved difficult with regards to the postmark cancellation. Because the majority of the stamp was black, a poorly-positioned cancellation was nearly invisible. And, unscrupulous people found that they could wash or bleach a canceled stamp and re-use it easily. As a result, the postal service flipped the colors: the red cancellation on a black stamp became black cancellations on a red stamp: the Penny Red. Those same unscrupulous stamp-washers also found that they could ‘cut’ two half-canceled stamps and put them together to make one ‘good’ stamp, but the engravers had another trick up their sleeve. Stamps after the 1860s had the corner ‘key’ letters repeated at the top, in reverse order: if the stamp had been cut, there would be four different letters on the stamp instead of two.

The Penny Post was devised as a means for the common person to communicate over large distances, as the previous postal system was weight-based and more expensive. With the advent of countrywide communication for a penny a pop, letter-writing exploded in popularity. This popularity, however, means that thousands upon thousands of Penny Blacks and Penny Reds were in circulation at the time, and since envelopes were not used as much today, much of the saved correspondence from the mid-19th century has a penny stamp on the backside somewhere. For collectors, this means that you can acquire your own Penny Black without much difficulty, provided you have enough pocket-change. Postmarked and circulated Penny Blacks sell for around $200 each, while uncirculated examples are significantly more rare and expensive. At the time of writing, there were a handful of Penny Blacks available on eBay, but an enormous amount of Penny Reds. Penny Reds are significantly more common, but were used for years. Older Penny Reds were unperforated and cut off the sheet; later Penny Reds have letters in all four corners and were perforated. An ambitious collector may also note that, with 240 possible letter combinations on a single printing plate, it would be an undertaking to collect just the various Penny Red letter combinations!

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 2:59 am and is filed under collecting fyi, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.