Modern Era
When Elizabeth II succeeded her father in 1952, new stamps were needed. The result was a collection of variations on a theme that came to be known as the Wilding issues, based on a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by photographer Dorothy Wilding.
Wildings were used until 1967, when the Machin issues were introduced on 5 June. The Machin design is very simple, a profile of the Queen on a solid colour background, and very popular, still being the standard British stamp as of 2012. They have been printed in scores of different colours; in addition, decimalisation required new denominations, and there have technical improvements in the printing process, resulting in literally hundreds of varieties known to specialists.
Read more about this topic: Postage Stamps And Postal History Of Great Britain
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or era:
“The modern world needs people with a complex identity who are intellectually autonomous and prepared to cope with uncertainty; who are able to tolerate ambiguity and not be driven by fear into a rigid, single-solution approach to problems, who are rational, foresightful and who look for facts; who can draw inferences and can control their behavior in the light of foreseen consequences, who are altruistic and enjoy doing for others, and who understand social forces and trends.”
—Robert Havighurst (20th century)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)