||This article needs additional citations for verification.
(October 2008)| |Date of production||1841–1879|
|Printer||Perkins, Bacon & Co| The Penny Red was a British
postage stamp, issued in 1841. It succeeded the Penny Black and
continued as the main type of postage stamp in the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until 1879, with only minor
changes to the design during that time. The colour was changed
from black to red because of difficulty in seeing a cancellation
mark on the Penny Black; a black cancel was readily visible on a
Penny Red. Initially, some of the same plates that were used to
print the Penny Black were used to print the Penny Red and about
21 billion Penny Reds were printed by Messrs. Perkins, Bacon &
Co. Initially, the stamp had no perforations, and had to be cut
from the sheet using scissors in the same manner as for the
Penny Black and the early printings of the Two pence blue.
Perforations, (experimental gauge 16), first came into use in
1850 and were officially adopted in 1854