Hidden Elements and "secret Marks"
Sometimes designers include tiny elements into a design, sometimes at the request of the stamp-issuing authority, sometimes on their own. Stamps may have a year or name worked into a design, while the US stamp honoring Rabbi Bernard Revel has a minute Star of David visible in his beard.
Secret marks are small design alterations added to distinguish printings unambiguously. These usually take the form of small lines or marks added to clear areas of a design. Chinese stamps of the 1940s have secret marks in the form of slightly altered characters, where two arms might be changed to touch, when previously they were separate.
Read more about this topic: Postage Stamp Design
Famous quotes containing the words hidden, elements, secret and/or marks:
“A hidden strength
Which if Heav’n gave it, may be term’d her own:
‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:
She that has that, is clad in compleat steel,
And like a quiver’d Nymph with Arrows keen
May trace huge Forests, and unharbour’d Heaths,
Infamous Hills, and sandy perilous wildes,
Where through the sacred rayes of Chastity,
No savage fierce, Bandite, or mountaneer
Will dare to soyl her Virgin purity,”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The secret to fencing consists in two things: to give and to not receive.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)
“... my aim is now, as it has been for the past ten years, to make myself a true woman, one worthy of the name, and one who will unshrinkingly follow the path which God marks out, one whose aim is to do all of the good she can in the world and not be one of the delicate little dolls or the silly fools who make up the bulk of American women, slaves to society and fashion.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)