Figure 1. Provisional Issue forty lepta stamp.
(click on stamp image to see larger view)

Classification of the Forty Lepta Stamps

In classifying the forty lepta, I used the numbering system of Groom which is shown in Table 1 together with that of Constantinides in the Etude. Most of you are familiar with these designations and I will not give here a detailed discussion of each issue. However, there are a few points I would like to mention. Regarding the Provisional, Coundouros states that the Coarse Provisional probably does not exist. Similarly, I do not accept the existence of the May 1862 issue because I could not find any distinguishing characteristics with which to separate them from the other early Consecutive Athens issues. Issues B through F correspond to the Constantinides issues 32a through 32e but not in the same order.

There are two Cleaned Plate issues which are distinguished by the color of their face which is gray-mauve for Ga and mauve for Gb both having the same control number setting. There are three Inferior Paper issues each distinguished by the color of the face of the stamp, rose-bistre, yellow-bistre and lilac-rose, the famous Solferino.

There are many Meshed Paper issues, all on blue paper with a darker shade than the earlier issues. There are many varying combinations of the color of the face and the color of the control numbers. These will be discussed in more detail later.

The two Cream Paper categories are separated by the presence or absence of control numbers, those with control numbers Issues P and Q have face colors of gray bistre and rose bistre respectively. The issues without controls, R, S and T have colors: brown, reddish-brown and brownish-red respectively. The last appears red in color and is very unusual and rather rare. Some have questioned whether it is chemically altered.

Table 1

Classification of the Forty Lepta Issues

Issues	Groom	Constantinides	Face Color	Cont. No. Color	Paper Color
	(Modified)
Paris	Paris	6	mauve		blue
Provisional - Coarse		13	The 40 lepta coarse provisional does not exist according to Coundouros
Provisional - Fine	A	19	mauve	mauve	blue
Consecutive Athens	B	25/32a	mauve	mauve	blue
	C	32b	mauve	mauve	blue
	D	32e	mauve	mauve	blue
	E	32c	gray-mauve	gray-mauve	blue
	F	32d	gray-rose	grayish-rose	gray-lilac
Cleaned Plate	Ga	39a	gray-mauve	mauve	blue
	Gb	39b	mauve	mauve	blue
Inferior Paper	Ia	48a	rose-bistre	reddish-mauve	greenish
	Ia	48b	yellow-bistre	reddish-mauve	greenish
	Ic	48c	lilac-rose (Solferino)	lilac-rose	greenish
Meshed Paper	Ja	54a	olive	olive	blue (darker shade)
	Jb	5baA	olive	bronze	blue (darker shade)
	Ka	54b,54c	bronze	olive	blue (darker shade)
	Kb	54cA	bronze	bronze	blue (darker shade)
	L	54dA	orange-brown	orange-brown	blue (darker shade)
	Ma	54e,54eB	gray-mauve	gray-mauve	blue (darker shade)
	Mb	54eA	gray-mauve	olive	blue (darker shade)
	Na	54f	mauve	mauve	blue (darker shade)
	Nb	54fA	mauve	olive	blue (darker shade)
	Nc	54gB	mauve	gray-mauve	blue (darker shade)
	O	54g	groseille(deep-mauve)	mauve	blue (darker shade)
Cream Paper
with control numbers	P	64a	gray-bistre	gray-bistre	cream
	Q	64b	rose-bistre (dull orange)	gray-bistre	cream
without control nos.	R	70a	brown		cream
	S	70b	reddish-brown		cream
	T		brownish-red		cream

Figure 2 shows the numbers of stamps in each issue which were examined as part of this study. Since these stamps were accumulated randomly at auction or by direct purchase, this graph should be an approximate indication of the relative scarcity of the various issues. As one would expect, the Paris and Provisional issues are low in number. The Consecutive Athens, Meshed Paper, Cleaned Plate and Cream Paper Without Controls are the highest. The very low numbers of the Cream Paper With Controls were somewhat surprising and it is not clear if the apparent scarcity of these printings is real.

Figure 2. Number of stamps examined in this study.

Images of the Stamps

Images of the several issues of the foty lepta stamps are presented in Figure 3 below. The issue designations are in accordance with those in Table 1 above.

Paris	Provisional	B-D	E	F
G	Ia	Ib	Ic	Ja
Ka	L	Ma	Nb	O
P	Q	R	S	T

Figure 3. Images of the various issues of the 40 lepta stamps.

Colors of the Papers

The colors of the papers of the various issues are shown in Figure 3. The paper color of the Paris, Provisional, Consecutive Athens (sub-issues B, C, D, E) and Cleaned Plate (G) issues is blue, essentially the same for all of these issues. There may be variations in shade even within the same sub-issue, but it is believed that some of these may have been caused by yellowing due to exposure to light. The only Consecutive Athens Issue whose color differs from the others in this category is sub-issue F which has a pinkish-gray color. Tseriotis calls it gray-lilac and Vlastos designates it as lilac gray, but, in my view, the predominate color is gray with a pinkish or lilac tint. This paper color is unique among the 40 lepta Large Hermes Head stamps. The paper color of all three Inferior Paper sub-issues is greenish. This paper color and the color of the face together form the basis for identification of the rare Solferino stamp. All of the many Meshed Paper sub-issues have the same paper color, blue. However, this blue color has a darker shade than that of the early 40 lepta issues mentioned above and can be distinguished easily from the lighter shade. The paper color of the Cream Paper sub-issues with controls, P-Q is generally cream, as its name denotes but it sometimes appears as very light brown. The Cream Paper sub-issues without controls, R-S, have a slightly darker color which, in some cases, may be caused by the darker shade of the front showing through the paper.

Paris	Provisional	B-D	E	F
G	I	J-O	P	R

Figure 4. Colors of the papers.

Paper Thickness

The thickness of the paper used to print the 40 lepta stamps was measured using several examples from each of the issues. The results are presented in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Paper thickness.

In this chart, the vertical lines extend from the lowest measured thickness to the highest for each issue. The short horizontal bar on each vertical line is the average thickness. One will note that the issues with the thinnest paper (approximately 2.5 to 2.6 mils) are the Paris, Meshed Paper (J-O) and Cream Paper Issue with Controls (P-Q). In fact these P-Q issues have the narrowest spread between their lowest and highest measured values. This issue is also the one with the lowest number of stamps in the author’s collection, indicating that it was probably printed in small quantities. Because of this, perhaps only a single batch of paper of uniform thickness (2.5 mils) was used in its printing.

The Provisional issue had the highest average measurement of about 3.3 mils. The next issues which include the Consecutive Athens (B-E), Inferior Paper (I) and Cleaned Plate (G) all have about the same average thickness of approximately 3.1 mils. The Cream Paper Issue without Controls had an average thickness of about 2.8 thousandths of an inch.

Constantinides describes the Meshed Paper Issues (of all denominations) as having thin paper. This study confirms that observation for the 40 lepta which indeed have thin paper (2.6 mils) as compared to the preceding issues. This differs from the ten lepta where it was observed that its Meshed Paper stamps had relatively thick paper (3.1 mils).

Other Paper Characteristics

There is a detailed description in the Etude (the comprehensive study of the Hellenic Philotelic Society in Athens, edited by Tryphon Constantinides) of the different characteristics of the papers used to print the Large Hermes Head stamps. Descriptions are used such as satiny, superior quality, not smooth but rough, strong, porous, thin, transparent or semi-transparent, thin, medium thickness, sprinkled with oily spots, meshed, inferior quality, thick, opaque, etc. For the most part, noticeable differences were not observed in this study in the quality of the papers used for printing the 40 lepta stamps, excluding paper color, the satiny paper of the Paris Issue and the meshed paper of the later issues. This applies also to the so-called Inferior Paper Issue which in this author’s opinion does not have inferior paper. The name is retained, however, because of long usage in Hellenic philately.

One paper characteristic is so important that one issue was given its name, i.e. the Meshed Paper Issue. Its sub-issues include modified Groom types J to O. The paper of 40 lepta stamps of this issue exhibits a regular pattern of light spots when the stamp is held up to the light. This pattern is usually not uniformly dispersed over the entire stamp and sometimes it is difficult to discern whether it is indeed a regular pattern or simply a random distribution of oily or light spots. In any case, this phenomenon has been given the name of meshed paper and it is one of the features used to identify Issues J to O of the 40 lepta.

Printing Underlay

In printing the Large Hermes Head stamps various materials were sometimes placed in the printing press under the sheet of paper being printed (the underlay) to allow the plate to better impress the images of the stamps. The first issue of the Large Hermes Heads were printed in Paris, as the name implies, and, in this issue, a découpage was used as the underlay consisting of a few sheets of printed proofs of the stamps modified as follows. The white areas were cut out from each of the 150 stamps on one of these proof sheets. Then, on the next sheet, the white areas and lightly shaded areas were cut out and this procedure repeated on one or more sheets with each one having more areas of the stamp design removed. This allowed the printers to achieve a fine gradation in the pressure applied to the different areas of the stamp design. The result was the beautiful impression of the Paris Issue stamps with their fine shading lines of the cheek, nape and neck, the clear and distinct imprint of the wavy lines and dots in the four spandrels and the solid color of the medallion background surrounding the head of Hermes. The use of such a découpage requires a very careful alignment of the printing plate and the découpage underlay.

When the plates were sent to Athens, the first stamps were printed using a similar découpage but, because the printers were inexperienced, the results were faulty. In these so-called coarse impressions of the Provisional Issue, one often finds a white shadow around one or more sides of the head of Hermes and sometimes the spandrels appear whitish because of poor contact of the printing plate. This faulty printing was obviously caused by a misalignment of the découpage with the printing plate.

Because of this poor result, the underlay was changed to a piece of felt cloth without any attempt to cut out areas corresponding to the stamp design. This resulted in heavier impressions of the printing and generally thicker shading and other lines of the design. This was a definite improvement over the coarse printing of the Provisional Issue stamps but stamps produced in this manner did not approach the beauty of the Paris Issue printings. It is believed that most of the stamps printed in Athens used this method. One consequence of the use of a felt cloth is that an embossing effect was produced in the stamps, i.e. parts of the stamp design were in relief, which becomes very apparent when the stamp is held at a low angle to a light. However, over a period of time, the piece of felt underlay became flattened, the embossing effect was much reduced and, in fact, most of the Athens printings, which presumably used a felt underlay, do not show this embossing effect.

Another effect possibly caused by the use of a felt underlay is that marginal stamps, i.e. those that come from the top and bottom rows of the sheet and from the extreme left and extreme right sides, exhibit a thickened frame line on the outer edge of the stamp. For example, in the example shown in Figure 1 of a Provisional Issue stamp from position 6, the top frame line is obviously thicker than the frame lines of the other three sides. This was probably caused by the extra pressure applied to the outer edges of the frame lines when the printing plate was pressed against the sheet of paper into the felt underlay. However, when just a few sheets of paper are used as the underlay, this thickened outer frame line usually is not observed. Thus, marginal stamps of the Paris Issue do not have any heavy frame lines.

In the Provisional Issue, some stamps have a fine appearance without any of the faults mentioned above regarding the coarse printing. Some specialists therefore have divided this issue into two sub-categories, the coarse and fine printings, and some believe that these fine printings were produced using a felt underlay. In this study, eight Provisional Issue stamps from the margins of the sheet were examined to see if they exhibited heavy frame lines which would indicate that they were printed using a soft underlay. All of these stamps did indeed show a heavy frame line. None showed any traces of a “cloud” around the head of Hermes or any whitened spandrels, characteristics of the coarse Provisionals. This seems to confirm the observation of Coundouros that in the 40 lepta, only Fine Provisional stamps were printed.

The type of underlay used might have had an effect on the appearance of the stamps of the Cleaned Plate Issue. This possibility results from the observation that these stamps have a very fine impression but are not clean with respect to the number of ink spots compared to other issues. We will discuss the appearance of ink spots on the 40 lepta stamps later but we can state briefly here that as the printing plates were used over a period of years, they were not thoroughly cleaned, resulting in dried clumps of ink remaining on the plate. Sheets of stamps printed from these “dirty” plates exhibited ink spots wherever these dried clumps were located. The number of ink spots on stamps of each position and in each issue were carefully reported in this study and it was observed that the so-called Cleaned Plate stamps had the most ink spots together with the preceding Issue F of the Consecutive Athens Issue. Therefore, the 40 lepta Cleaned Plate stamps were not clean and the name Cleaned Plate is a misnomer.

The reason for calling these stamps clean is that most of them have a distinctive appearance with the shading lines of the cheek and the wavy lines and dots of the spandrels being very finely printed without any smearing of one line with the next. However, there are some Cleaned Plate stamps with a coarser impression, and it is the opinion of the author that these stamps with the fine impression were printed using a hard underlay consisting of a few sheets of paper whereas those with a coarse impression used a softer underlay, perhaps one made of felt. But further studies raised some questions about this hypothesis which should be studied by other students of the large Hermes heads.

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