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Printing plates
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The Schnakenburg plant in Riga used two different plates for printing the map stamps. The second plate went into use after the first plate became worn, and corrected some flaws that developed in the first plate. The plate number appears in Roman numeral form under the 9th stamp in the bottom row.
Q18 Kupischki, block of 4 showing plate I. Roman numeral I slants slightly to the right; the red dot directly beneath the numeral is part of the plate number.
O18 Kławany, block of 3x2 showing plate II. Roman numeral II slants slightly to the left; the red dot slightly to the right beneath the numeral [partly obliterated by perf holes in this example] is part of the plate number.
Printing plate arrangement and flaws
Both printing plates had 12 rows of 19 stamps and were formed by successive uses of a transfer stone with 5x5 clichés. The first 10 rows of each plate have the same arrangement of transfer stone clichés. The last 2 rows on each plate differ from each other.
Some plate flaws in the 5x5 transfer stone appear in plate I and plate II stamps. Some are unique to plate I or plate II.
For an excellent description of the printing stone formats and plate flaws, see
Lettland (Latvia) Handbuch Philatelie und Postgeschichte (Handbook of Philately and Postal History), Die Briefmarken in Rubel-Währung 1918-1922 (The Stamps, Ruble Period 1919-1922) [Harry v. Hofmann Verlag, Hamburg, Germany, 1998, ISBN 3 7636 5071 7 <6800>, pp.26-41], bi-lingual in German and English.
References before this one incorrectly reported that both printing stones had the same format. N. Jakimovs [†2000] corrected this.
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Created 2001-03-26; updated Fri, 2010-02-05 .
Copyright ©2001 to 2010, Bill Apsit
