The Dies
The master die was engraved by William Wyon using as his basis the City medal of 1837 which he had also engraved. (This was the same model used for the head engraved on the Penny Black).
The original master die did not show the pendant curl at the back of the hair and was not used in this form on the postage stamps, although it was used at the Royal Mint for coinage.
From this master, a series of sub-dies were made and the curl added to the back of the hair. As such the curl differs on each value. Also added to the dies, after the outer design had been completed, was a die number. This takes the form of a number with the letters W W either before or after and appears at the base of the neck of Queen Victoria.
Read more about this topic: British Embossed Postage Stamps
Famous quotes containing the word dies:
“The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)