Stamp Dies/Plates

What happens to the old stamp dies/plates, or whatever the proper term is, once the run is completed, be they engraved or computer generated or however they are done on recent stamps? What about the old stamps, early US? Are/were they kept for archival purposes or routinely destroyed? Just curious, the UNPS purchase got me wondering.

Mucho gracias viejos y viejas!

My last visit to the museum, to view these was fruitless, they had moved the stones.
Still have not seen them "in the flesh'
The "Doorstop" was the other stone that cracked during the Duke of York's visit

I meant to add...........

If anyone here, has been blessed with owning any of these 1854 issues,
I can offer a blow up of the stone, so one can see just where on the stone that particular stamp was positioned...........

Now would be cool......

If you navigate up from the bottom left hand side 5 stamps, you arrive at the famous "Inverted Frame" stamp.

.........Ooops, I positioned the scan skew-whiff, so you will have to count down 5 stamps from the top right hand side of the 4d blues.

Now having seen one, I can now imagine why what types of errors occured as they did. It's amazing, though, that with all of the newest technologies, mistakes are still made - whether accidentally or
"on purpose".

Still cool to see. I wonder how they'll preserve it as a piece of history.

Aw Heck, everybody knows this one!

The old plates are given to a secret society - some say the Knights
Templar - others say the Area 41ers. Whichever, they are taken to
Spanish North Africa (called the SNA) and buried deep in a secret cave in the mountains and then covered by billions of tons of Fennec chips!

Hey Victor - how do you like this answer?

Actually, some of the plates were either defaced or destroyed. On the early stamps, each individual stamp in a plate was an individual die.
As they wore out, some were re-engraved - some new ones were engraved....this gives a gaggle of collectors a way to rebuild sheets printed of said plates. Some of the dies were stuck away in vaults of the original printing company. Sometimes those companies lost their contract to print the stamps and the plates/dies were handed over to another company to print the stamps where they were usually re-engraved - and then later they went to yet another where the same process was engaged. In the end the USPS (usually) reclaimed the dies/plates. wha tthey did with them is still a question. We do know, from recent issues, that some of the plates must have escaped destruction. Some have been re-released (colors changed or the dies re-engraved) for recent commemoratives.

When you get to the most recent stamps (past 3-4 years) one can only wonder. Some of these have been printed by inkjet printers. Are the software/PDF (or whatever) files merely erased or are they stored on
CD-DVD's?

This brings up an interesting posit. Blank stamps can be purchased from several 'ego' companies. Today's scanners - even the $49.00 models are capable of scanning in a stamp at hi-res. The scan can then be reduced to correct size and then ported to a graphics program.
The stamp could easily be reproduced and run out by the thousands - hundreds of thousands even - on any modern inkjet printer.

Hmmmmm................

Here is the Litho stone for the 1854 Fourpenny Blue and the One shilling Red-Brown

An absolutely amazing find in 1979, and one of our treasures.
http://groups.msn.com/Stamps/shoebox.msnw? action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=149
http://groups.msn.com/Stamps/shoebox.msnw? action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=150

Cool to see these!