Color

There is surprising uniformity of color on early stamps. The first stamp, the Penny Black, was -wait for it- black but that was soon seen to be a mistake and within a year the color of the design was changed to what the English call red and which we would call a red-brown. This red brown became the color for the first class postage rate issue of most of the world’s major stamp issuing nations.There were two reason for this. First, Rowland Hill’s original idea for a postage stamp called for color coding. The first class single rate postage was to be black and the double rate stamp blue. The color coding between different denominations and different rate stamps , which we take as a given, was a decision made to aid postal clerks in their accounting for sold and unsold postage stamps and postal workers in quickly knowing if the correct postage was paid on letters. A bold color like red facilitated this aspect of color coding. Secondly, red (and its shades) was picked for the color of the main postage rate in the early period because red is a very forgiving color for intaglio printing. Engraving requires great skill and care on the part of the printer. Improperly inked plates or inadequately pressed impressions produce a lot of wastage. The red family was found to look better if slightly less than perfectly printed and pigments in the red family were less corrosive to the plates. Philatelists  have seen this in their collecting as most common rate stamps (and therefore the most printed) of the Nineteenth century from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany and China and many others are all in the red brown shade area.