XXI.
The Issue of 1867-9.
The Act of the XXXIX Congress, Session I, Chapter 114, Section 7, approved June 12th, 1866, entitled an Act to amend the Postal Laws, had provided among other things.
"Sec. 7. And be it further enacted: that whenever it shall become expedient in the opinion of the Postmaster General to substitute a different kind of postage stamps for those now in use, he shall be, and is hereby authorized to modify the existing contracts for the manufacture of postage stamps, so as to allow the contractors a sum sufficient to cover the increased expenses, if any, of manufacturing stamps so substituted."
The Report for the Postmaster General for the year ending June 30th, 1867, states that experiments had been made in printing postage stamps on an embossed paper, which appeared to offer a fair guarantee against fraud; that the tissues of the paper were broken by the process, so that the ink of the cancelling stamps penetrated the stamps in such a manner as to render cleaning impossible; that the adhesiveness of the stamps was also increased, to say nothing of other advantages, which recommend the invention. Some of these curious experiments will be noticed in the chapter on Essays. The plan adopted was, however, to emboss the stamp, after it was printed, with a series of small square points, arranged in the form of a rectangle, much in the same way that checks are sometimes treated to prevent alteration. This breaks the tissues of the paper. The French collectors call this a grille, or grating, which it resembles. There were several varieties used on this issue, and they were applied to the stamps then current, without other change in the design, paper, color or gum.
Issue of 1867 to 1869.
The first variety was a grille covering the entire stamp, adopted May 8th, 1867, and applied only to the
3 cents, rose, perforated 12, grilled all over.
If this is examined with a glass on the face of the stamp, there appear to be rows of slightly raised squares, separated by depressed straight lines, with a still more raised cross, formed by diagonal lines running from corner to corner of the square. If the back is examined, the straight lines appear raised, the crosses depressed. In all specimens examined, the embossing is very flat.