For the first four years of the Discworld stamps the Penny Patrician retained the same basic design, with only the top cartouche symbols changing. There were other special Patricians where the corner lettering also varied during those years, but all bore a remarkable similarity to the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black. For the Year of the Three Roses the symbol chosen was appropriately a rosebud.

The sheets were printed somewhere in deepest East Anglia and perforated in Wincanton. There were 25 stamps to a sheet in a five by five arrangement. There was a sport on the sheet with the rosebud replaced by a blooming rose, on the third row, leftmost stamp.

common sport

Okay, so that’s all pretty conventional, but there were reports of misalignment during perforating leading to one column of stamps being a tad wider, and another a tad narrower. In cases like these the actual stamp image is always the same, but the margins vary - see the picture. The stamp with the left margin is normal sized, so no skinny or fat sport there. This is a natural consequence of hand perforating, line by line. And there was a reported instance of an entire unperforated sheet being received by a collector. But what makes this issue different is the additional sports, both released and the rejected ideas.

The other sports, though, are a different thing, with three appearing in LBEs during the year, and (at least) ten more rejected.

Other imperforate sheets of the stamps exist in collections, but the definitive issue to which these belong was also prepared on thin un-gummed card as test prints, a presentation I have not seen in the previous years’ defintives.