The British Library and The Man

The man said a lot.

And what the man said was amazing.

What the man knew was phenomenal.

This here is one of the most expensive misprinted stamps in history. Find it in the Philatelic Collections at the british library amongst many others, all on cool slidy-out-draws.

100 copies of this stamp were misprinted. Of the two printing blocks used, the one depicting a plane is upside-down. They're worth about 9 million dollars.

And the man who originally had them, left his stamp collection room open, where his wife wondered in, flicked through the book, unknowingly dropping one of these babies on the floor and was subsequently hoovered up by the maid. He stuck it back together, but it aint worth much now, said the man.

Other noted and valuable misprints are:

• Albino stamps- no colour. Great term for a stamp.
• Unprinted areas
• Overlapping colours
• Folded over corners and edges

Printing presses are cool.

First printing press around 1450

The man said the British Library holds every single uk publication. Everything from books to music scores to newpapers and magazines. On one day nearly 8,000 publications were put into the libraries records. If you hold a card to the library, you can access and look at any of these, often without gloves. Although you are heavily supervised.

A gentleman was seen cutting out pages form a valuable book was given 2years in prison. These publications are regarded as the 'last resort' copies.. That I thought was a pretty amazing concept. 

Mr. Shakespeare's plays were not immediately published, as as far as he was concerned, that wasn't the purpose of his plays. they were to be seen not read. However many actors would take their scripts to printers and bookmakers to have them made up and take the profits.

There was a slight issue with this however as they would only ever have their lines. So sometimes a few together would go forth to a printmaker, but obviously in these circumstances, profit would then be split.

So very often actors would borrow or steal others scripts to form the whole play.

This clearly made room for a serious amount of errors and early publications of Shakespeare's plays were in the wrong order, with missing parts and sometimes half the size of the original play.

Who would have known, well the man did. So he says.

All finally printed actual copies of the play were acquired and accounted for except one, until 8 months ago. The last copy had been missing from Durham Uni 20 years ago. The copy turned up somewhere in the states, a man handed it in with the front page cut out. He got 8 years in prison. Don't mess with the Library was my real lesson of the day.

To be continued