Tête-bêche

This article is about stamps. For bookbinding, see Dos-à-dos binding.

Tête-bêche pairs of the Swiss "William Tell's son" design of 1910 are relatively common.

In philately, tête-bêche (French for "head-to-tail", lit. "head-to-head") is a joined pair of stamps in which one is upside-down in relation to the other, produced intentionally or accidentally. Like any pair of stamps, a pair of tête-bêches can be a vertical or a horizontal pair. In the case of a pair of triangular stamps, they cannot help but be linked "head-to-tail". Mechanical errors during the process of production can result in tête-bêches, but in most cases tête-bêches are produced for the purpose of collecting.

During the printing of stamps for booklets, the pages of stamps are usually printed in multiples from a larger printing plate. This can result in tête-bêche pairs. It is unusual for these pairs to find their way into the postal system, as they are cut into individual booklet pages before binding into the distributed booklet. A block of 24 5d Machin stamps, which should have been guillotined into four booklet pages, includes four tête-bêche pairs. This was sold in 1970, in the normal course of business, by the British Post Office and is exhibited by a member of the Royal Mail Stamp Advisory Committee.

Tête-bêche layout required that the 1921 overprints of Switzerland were arranged to match.

See also

• Sheet of stamps

External links

• Hong Kong tête-bêche forgeries
• Israel tête-bêche blocks from the Sol Singer Collection of Philatelic Judaica
• Luxembourg tête-bêche block
• Pairs of pentagonal tête-bêche stamps