Varieties include watermarks, inverts, imperforates, missing colors, wrong colors and major color shifts. See also Freak. The central part of a stamp design, usually surrounded by a border. The vignette often shades off gradually into the surrounding area. A deliberate thinning of paper during its manufacture, to produce a semitranslucent pattern.
Watermarks appear frequently in paper used in stamp printing.
See also Batonne. British sheets printed before 1880 were perforated down the center of the gutter, producing oversized margins on one side of stamps adjacent to the gutter. Such copies are distinctive and scarcer than normal copies. A paper showing few differences in texture and thickness when held to light. In the production of wove paper, the pulp is pressed against a very fine netting, producing a virtually uniform texture.