THE UNDERLAY USED IN PRINTING THE LARGE HERMES HEAD STAMPS OF GREECE
When printing the Large Hermes Head stamps, material was placed under the sheet of paper being printed to compensate for any unevenness in the height of the individual clichés or dies which made up the printing plate. This material consisted sometimes of a sheet of felt, other times a few sheets of paper and, in three instances, a specially prepared découpage, which will be described below. In some cases, no underlay was used and the sheet of paper being printed was in direct contact with the bed of the printing press. It is believed that the type of underlay used had a profound effect on the impressions of both the face of the stamp and the control numbers on the back. Although there have been discussions in various sources of this use of an underlay in printing the large heads of Greece, I don’t believe enough attention has been given to many aspects of their use. In this study, possible explanations will be given for many of the observed characteristics of both the face and the control numbers of these printings. (For a more detailed description of the use of the underlay, please see the discussion of L. N. and M. Williams.)1
The Printing Press
Before proceeding with a discussion of the various types of underlays, we should look at what a printing press of this period might look like. Since I am not an expert in the printing trade, this description is only my best guess as to how the large Hermes heads were printed. The relief printing method was used wherein the raised surfaces of the printing plate received ink which was then impressed into the paper. Figure 1 shows a very simplified sketch of a hand press in which the plate would be lowered onto the paper held in a frame.
Figure 2 shows an enlarged view of the left edge of the plate with the cliché colored red. The cliché is pressed into the paper which lies above the felt underlay held in a frame. If a découpage is used, it would be held in a frame in a similar way. Note that the felt is compressed under the pressure of the plate. The edge of the paper is bent because the portion of felt not under the plate is uncompressed and the paper conforms to the shape of the felt. When the plate is first lowered onto the paper, the edge of the cliché rubs against the paper as it forces the paper to bend and that is why we see heavy frame lines on the marginal sides of stamps printed using a felt underlay. I have examined a few Paris Issue marginal stamps to see if they show any signs of a heavy frame line and found that in most cases they do not. In the few Paris stamps where a heavy frame line was observed, it was only slightly heavier than the non-marginal sides. We would not expect to see heavy frame lines in Paris Issue stamps because paper is relatively uncompressible and there would be no smearing of the edge of the paper as the plate is pressed into it.
Another effect observed in stamps printed with a felt underlay is the embossing of the raised elements of the cliché. This is particularly noticeable when the felt is new; it is not observed in stamps printed with a felt underlay which has become flattened after long use.
The Paris Issue
The Paris Issues of the Large Hermes Head stamps are the most beautifully executed of all the printings of this first series of Greece. Although the same plates were used to print these stamps over a period of some 25 years, the printers in Athens were never able to achieve results comparable to those achieved in Paris. These fine impressions of the Paris issues have been attributed both to the exceptional skill of the French printers and to the use of a so-called découpage. An example of a 20 lepta Paris Issue stamp from Position 111 of the sheet is presented in Figure 3, with enlarged views of the shading lines of the face and the wavy lines of the upper right spandrel in Figures 4 and 5, respectively.
To understand what is meant by this term découpage, let us first explain how these stamps were printed. The type of press used was an ordinary hand press, one type of which had the printing plate mounted above with a blank sheet of paper below. The paper was held firmly in a frame while the plate was lowered by a screw or lever mechanism. The plate was pressed firmly into the paper so that a uniform impression was obtained. In order to ensure this uniform contact, a blanket or underlay was placed under the paper which was to be printed.
Why was such an underlay required? The reason is based on the manner in which the plates were constructed. The plates consisted of 150 clichés or dies which had been affixed to a bronze plate in 15 rows of ten. These clichés were attached by means of solder or adhesive and in some cases, they were not perfectly flat and not in the same plane as the other clichés. This is demonstrated by Position 54 of the ten lepta, where the left side of the cliché is elevated above the plane of the other clichés resulting in the stamp of that position having a very heavy frame line at the right and a very light one at the left. To reduce the effect of this unevenness in the height of the clichés, a piece of soft material such as felt could be placed beneath the sheet of paper being printed. In this way, when the plate was pressed into the paper, all surfaces of the clichés would make contact with the paper.
The design of the large Hermes head stamps had certain portions which were intended to be solidly colored. These include the backgrounds of the medallion, the inscription blocks, the fleurets and the left and right meanders. Other areas of the design which were comprised of engraved lines were intended to be finely printed without any merging or smearing of the lines. In the four spandrels, the design consists of fine wavy lines interspersed with small dots. To obtain a fine impression, these design elements should be separate and not touch each other. Other such areas include the helmet, and the shading lines of the cheek, neck and nape.
When a piece of felt was used as the underlay, the solid areas of the design were solidly printed without many small white spots, but in the areas containing fine lines, these lines were thickened and in some cases these design elements were smudged and touched each other.
Another possible underlay was the use of several pieces of paper placed under the sheet to be printed. Although this would make the fine lines more distinct without any smearing, the solid areas of the design would be less continuous and would include many small white spots due to the poor contact of the printing plate with the paper.
So what is needed is a thicker blanket under those portions of the design that are intended to be colored solid and a thinner blanket under those portions of the design that have fine lines. The Paris printers used an ingenious method to achieve both a continuous printing of the solid areas and fine and delicate impressions of the lined areas of the design. This method was the use of an underlay called the découpage. To prepare this découpage underlay, a few sheets of stamps were printed. On one of these sheets, a sharp knife was used to remove certain portions of the design from each of the 150 stamps on the sheet. On a second sheet, smaller portions of the design were removed and on third and fourth sheets, successfully smaller portions were removed. Four examples are presented in Figure 6 below to show how this process might have been accomplished because the actual découpage used in Paris in 1861 does not exist and there is no detailed description of how it was constructed. Pemberton in his 1911-12 series of articles mentions that Maury in his Histoire des Timbres-Post Francais published in 1907 describes how Hulot printed the early stamps of France using this same technique.
If the printers only wanted to make the background solid and the engraved lines delicate, only one cut-out should be needed, namely, Type A of figure 6. However, it will be noted that the wavy lines of the spandrels are finer than the shading lines of the face which, in turn, are finer than the engraved lines of the helmet. To emphasize these gradations in the thickness of the lines, several cut-outs were prepared. In the four types shown in Figure 6, three have the spandrels removed, two have the helmet removed, two have the full face removed, two have the face partially removed leaving the eye, and one has only the shading lines of the cheek removed. When the four types of sheets were glued together, certain parts of the design had thicker layers of paper resulting in their being more heavily printed, and those parts with thinner layers were less heavily printed. In this way it was possible to obtain different emphasis on the various parts of the design. These four types are only examples since the actual cut-outs used by the printers are unknown.
When these portions of the design are removed from the 150 stamps of four sheets, the sheets are glued on top of each other so that they are aligned perfectly with each part of the design of one sheet placed exactly on the same part of the design of the other. The sheets of Types A to D are shown in Figure 7. This assemblage of four types of glued sheets, the découpage, is then placed under the sheet to be printed. It must be located so that its design elements are in exact registration or alignment with the same elements of the printing plate. This must be done so that the solid elements of the design will coincide with the thicker portions of the découpage and the fine lines of each stamp will coincide with the thinner portions. By use of such a découpage, it was possible to achieve both solid backgrounds and a gradation of fine impressions of the engraved lines of the design.
The Provisional Issues
When the printing plates were sent to Athens for the Greek printers to start printing the stamps, an attempt was made to use the same sort of découpage. However, these printers were inexperienced and the results were never as good as those obtained in Paris. One of the problems was the misalignment of the découpage with the printing plate which resulted in the appearance of a so-called white contour in the background of the medallion, either in front of the face of Hermes or behind the back of the head.
Figure 8 below is a Provisional Issue (also known as the First Athens Issue) showing the white contour behind the head of Hermes, below the base of the neck, and in the upper part of the lower inscription block. An enlarged view of this same stamp is shown in Figure 9 with arrows pointing to the white contours. This shows that the découpage was out of alignment, having been placed a little to the left and a little lower than where it should have been. As a result, the areas with the white contour had thinner portions of the découpage beneath the paper being printed rather than the thicker ones and consequently were not solidly printed.
The Provisional Issues are usually divided into two sub-categories: the Coarse and the Fine. The Coarse issues show the white contour whereas the Fine do not. Constantinides3 states that the so-called Coarse Provisionals were printed using a faulty découpage and the Fine Provisionals with a felt blanket as the underlay.
The Consecutive Athens Issues
The soft underlay continued to be used from 1862 to 1867 for the Consecutive Athens Issues, which generally show a solid background and separate and distinct shading lines of the face. However, the shading lines of the face tend to be thickened and not delicately printed like the Paris printings and the wavy lines of the spandrels are so thickened that they sometimes touch the dots interspersed between them. An example of these issues is shown in Figure 10, with an enlarged picture of the upper right spandrel in Figure 11 and the shading lines of the face in Figure 12. These examples are representative of only a portion of the 1862-67 issues and some examples from this period will show finer and others coarser impressions.
The Cleaned Plate Issues
The so-called Cleaned Plate Issues were printed from 1868 to 1869 and presented an entirely different impression than the previous Consecutive Athens Printings of 1862-67. Because these issues appeared much finer with delicate lines of the spandrels and face of Hermes, it was believed that a cleaning of the plates had taken place to remove dried ink that had remained on the plates due to inadequate cleaning during their use in the preceding five years. It was for this reason that these issues were assigned the name Cleaned Plate. However, a detailed study of the ink spots on the ten and forty lepta shows that the first printings of these issues were among the dirtiest of all the Large Hermes Head series and that they were only partially cleaned during the remainder of their printings. The twenty lepta do show that a cleaning took place during this period but even this value shows many ink spots as displayed in the figures below. An example of a cleaned plate 20 lepta is presented in Figure 13, with enlarged views of the spandrel in Figure 14 and the face and medallion background in Figure 15.
So, if the fine impression of the Cleaned Plate printings cannot be attributed to the cleanliness of the plates, what is it about these issues that makes them look so much different from the previous ones. In my opinion, it is the use of a thinner underlay, one possibly consisting of only one or two sheets of paper or maybe none at all. This would result in a very fine impression of the fine lines of the engraving but a very incomplete printing of the background of the medallion which would be full of random white spots and not solid as in the previous printings. This feature can be seen in Figures 13, 14 and 15. Note also the many ink spots in all of these pictures.
