For postage stamps, separation is the means by which individual stamps are made easily detachable from each other.
A perforation is a small hole in a thin material or web. There is usually more than one perforation in an organized fashion, where all of the holes collectively are called a perforation. The process of creating perforations is called perforating, which involves puncturing the workpiece with a tool.
This is a list of philatelic topics.
A postage stamp booklet is a booklet made up of one or more small panes of postage stamps in a cardboard cover. Booklets are often made from sheets especially printed for this purpose, with a narrow selvage at one side of the booklet pane for binding. From the cutting, the panes are usually imperforate on the edges of the booklet. Smaller and easier to handle than a whole sheet of stamps, in many countries booklets have become a favored way to purchase stamps.
In philately, errors, freaks, and oddities (EFO) refers to all the kinds of things that can go wrong when producing postage stamps. It encompasses everything from major design errors to stamps that are just poorly printed, and includes both some of the most sought-after and expensive of all stamps, and others that attract the attention of only a few specialists.
The Prince Consort Essay was a surface printed printer's sample stamp created in 1851 as an example of the surface printed stamps that Henry Archer proposed to print and perforate under contract with the British government at a lower price than the current printing firm of Perkins Bacon. The Prince Consort stamps were provided by the artist Robert Edward Branston, from an engraving executed by Samuel William Reynolds.
The Rare 2d Coil was an experimental vertical coil stamp, denominated 2d, issued by the Irish Post Office in 1935 and is one of the scarcest, and most valuable, Irish stamps. It is often referred to by stamp collectors simply as "Scott 68b" or "SG 74b", being the Scott and Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue numbers respectively.
The philatelic use of the word gutter is the space left between postage stamps which allows them to be separated or perforated. When stamps are printed on large sheets of paper that will be guillotined into smaller sheets along the gutter it will not exist on the finished sheet of stamps. Some sheets are specifically designed where two panes of stamps are separated by a gutter still in the finished sheet and gutters may, or may not, have some printing in the gutter. Since perforation of a particular width of stamps is normal, the gutter between the stamps is often the same size as the postage stamp.
Definitive postage stamps of Ireland are the regular series of definitive postage stamps issued by the Irish Free State between 1922 and 1937 and by Republic of Ireland since 1937. Nine distinctly different series of designs have been released; additionally the watermark was changed for two issues and the currency was changed on three occasions while the designs remained the same.
An Affixing Machine is a machine that affixes postage stamps to an envelope, postcard or wrapper. Affixing machines first appeared in the 1850s but were not widely used until the early 20th century. Stamp affixing machines were brought about by the need to mechanically affix stamps for bulk processing of mail. A secondary reason for the machines was to make the theft of stamps more difficult for employees with access to a large inventory of coils. The first widespread machine was created in 1884 by Engle Frankmussler, a Norwegian, who created the ‘Postage Stamp Affixing Machine’ as it was then called, was a crank-operated hardy machine that was effective but vulnerable to tampering.
The Washington–Franklin Issues are a series of definitive U.S. Postage stamps depicting George Washington and Benjamin Franklin issued by the U.S. Post Office between 1908 and 1922. The distinctive feature of this issue is that it employs only two engraved heads set in ovals—Washington and Franklin in full profile—and replicates one or another of these portraits on every stamp denomination in the series. This is a significant departure from previous definitive issues, which had featured pantheons of famous Americans, with each portrait-image confined to a single denomination. At the same time, this break with the recent past represented a return to origins. Washington and Franklin, after all, had appeared on the first two American stamps, issued in 1847, and during the next fifteen years, each of the eight stamp denominations available featured either Washington or Franklin.
The Regular Issues of 1922–31 were a series of 27 U.S. postage stamps issued for general everyday use by the U.S. Post office. Unlike the definitives previously in use, which presented only a Washington or Franklin image, each of these definitive stamps depicted a different president or other subject, with Washington and Franklin each confined to a single denomination. The series not only restored the historical tradition of honoring multiple presidents on U. S. Postage but extended it. Offering the customary presidential portraits of the martyred Lincoln and Garfield, the war hero Grant, and the founding fathers Washington and Jefferson, the series also memorialized some of the more recently deceased presidents, beginning with Hayes, McKinley, Cleveland and Roosevelt. Later, the deaths of Harding, Wilson and Taft all prompted additions to the presidential roster of Regular Issue stamps, and Benjamin Harrison's demise (1901) was belatedly deemed recent enough to be acknowledged as well, even though it had already been recognized in the Series of 1902. The Regular Issues also included other notable Americans, such as Martha Washington and Nathan Hale—and, moreover, was the first definitive series since 1869 to offer iconic American pictorial images: these included the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol Building and others. The first time (1869) that images other than portraits of statesmen had been featured on U.S. postage, the general public disapproved, complaining that the scenes were no substitute for images of presidents and Franklin. However, with the release of these 1922 regular issues, the various scenes—which included the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial and even an engraving of an American Buffalo—prompted no objections. To be sure, this series presented pictorial images only on the higher-value stamps; the more commonly used denominations, of 12 cents and lower, still offered the traditional portraits.
The Series of 1902, also known as the Second Bureau Issue, is a set of definitive postage stamps in fourteen denominations ranging between one cent and five dollars, produced by the U. S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing and issued by the United States Post Office. Two denominations appeared in November and December 1902 and the other twelve were released between January and June 1903. These stamps were assigned the Scott Catalogue numbers 300 through 313. Also considered part of the series is a fifteenth stamp which appeared in November 1903—a second version of the 2¢ value, the original having faced severe criticism. This series, particularly noted for its exceptional ornateness and opulence of design, remained in circulation until late 1908, when it was superseded by the Washington-Franklin Issues.
The production of the first coil stamps, dating in the United States from 1908, began with the flat-plate-press printing of normal stamp sheets which contained the standard 400 images. The sheets were then gummed, perforated in one direction only, and cut in the other direction into twenty strips consisting of twenty stamps apiece. Strips would subsequently be pasted together to produce coils of 500 or 1000 stamps. At each join, the paper from the end of one strip would overlap the beginning of the next. A pair of stamps that straddles the join is known as a paste-up pair.
In philatelic terminology, perforation gauge has two meanings:
Coil waste is a type of U.S. stamp made from damaged or unusable printing stock intended for use as coil stamps and is a term applied to several stamp issues of the late 1910s and early 20s. Sometimes in the printing of coils on rotary presses, a number of stamps from the run were deemed unusable for coil production. Instead of discarding these, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing processed them through the flat-plate perforating machine to finish them as fully perforated stamps. These finished products are known as coil waste. While seemingly identical to normal fully perforated issues, coil waste stamps are distinguishable by their size: their designs are slightly wider or longer than normal because rotary press printing slightly stretches an image.
Nyasaland, now known as Malawi, first issued revenue stamps as British Central Africa in 1891 and continued to do so until the late 1980s.
In philately, label or coupon or tab is a part of sheet of stamps separated from them with perforation. It cannot be used for postage because it does not have face value and any indication of a postal administration that issued such stamps with labels. The notion of label should not be messed up with the term "gutter" or with a margin of a stamp sheet.
