Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Printing matters

Ever since I discover philately some fifteen years ago, I keep feeling uneasy in front of printing methods, especially to recognize gravure from offset.

As a Frenchspeaking native, this feeling is stronger for a year and the exploration of the rich but Englishspeaking jungle of British philately.

For the first fear, Dominique of the Blog Philatélie summarizes the differences with, this time, examples of stamps of France personalized with labels: his first article and the second one.

For the British matter, Machin Mania helps thank to the arrival of lithograph-printed Machin stamps inside prestige booklets : to read.

In French, héliogravure is the English equivalent of photogravure (now gravure if a computer replaces the photograph). Lithography is told offset. The trap for a French philatelist is the faux-ami gravure, because, in France, gravure is used in the context of recess-printed stamps, whose illustration is made by an engraver (un graveur).

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