Printing plates

Reconstructions of the complete printing plates of the issue — each plate as a grid of a hundred stamp fields in the order in which they lie in the sheet. The thumbnail for each plate is its first stamp field, an actual stamp from that plate.

5hplate I 5hplate II 5hplate VI 5hplate VIII 10hplate I 10hplate II 15hplate II ★ 15hplate III ★ 15hplate IV ★ 15hplate V ★ 15hplate VI ★ 20hplate II 25hplate I 25hplate II 60hplate II 120hplate II 300hplate I

Plates marked ★ lead to the fuller treatment on the 15h site — with a field comparator and statistics.

How the stamp fields are numbered

A Hradčany sheet consists of 100 stamp fields, each with its own number. Some values were printed from several plates, so a stamp is identified by the pair field/plate — 37/III, for instance, is field 37 of the third plate.

Letterpress left a small plate variety on practically every field. What distinguishes one from a random printing flaw is that it recurs on every stamp from the same field of the same plate — which is why it can be catalogued and why it serves to identify a position. Deviations tied instead to one sheet or one pass through the machine are production flaws.

On the individual plate pages, fields are highlighted where a type of the design is recorded — an open spiral, a long crossbar, an arch or an unbroken frame. Details of the types are on the Fifth-design types page.

My guide to the plate varieties has been Jiří Zahradníček’s Hradčany – deskové vady. For identifying the field of a particular copy, Knihtisk.org is an excellent resource.

Plate diagrams to download

Fellow philatelist Radek Novák compiled clear diagrams of the printing plates from Monograph No. 1. The Excel file is free to download.