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:
“It is a hidden fear that somehow, if they are only given a chance, women will suddenly do as they have been done by.”
—Eva Figes (b. 1932)
“Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“Methinks a Man cannot, without a secret Satisfaction, consider the Glory of the present Age, which will shine as bright as any other in the History of Mankind. It is still big with great Events, and has already produced Changes and Revolutions which will be as much admired by Posterity, as any that have happened in the Days of our Fathers, or in the old Times before them.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man’s unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)