Penny Black

Penny Black Stamp Technical Details

The Penny Black was first printed on May 1, 1840. It was printed on 11 plates, issuing a total of 68,808,000 stamps. You can see the number of stamps printed on each plate on the Penny Black Rarity page. Plate 1 was overhauled due to excessive wear, so is generally broken down into plate 1a and plate 1b. Plate 11 has a particuarlly small number of stamps printed since it was also used to print the Penny Red Stamp later on.

Each plate consists of 240 stamps, in sheets of 20 rows by 12 columns. The position of the stamp is labeled by the two letters at the lower left and bottom right hand side of each stamp. The left letter stands for the row the stamp was in, ranging from A to T, representing rows 1 through 20. The right letter stands for the column the stamp was in, ranging from A to L, representing columns 1 through 12.

These letters exist because people often pieced together two uncancelled portions of used stamps to reuse the postage, so these check letters were introduced to rpevent fraud. This particular printing configuration was chosen because there were 240 pence in a pound, so people can buy the whole sheet for a pound. There were also 12 pence in a shilling, so a row of the whole sheet would cost 1 shilling.

The reverse of the each stamp had a small crown watermark, to try to prevent forgery. When used, each stamp was cancelled with a red watermark. However, because it was hard to see the red cancellation on the black stamp, the post office eventualy moved to the Penny Red Stamp in 1854 with the black watermark.