‘Unique’ stamp for International Women’s Day

Print Solutions

To mark International Women’s Day on March 8, 2014, bpost released a new stamp. This very special stamp shows the face of a young lady, depicted in no less than 606 words. The stamp could now be listed in Guinness World Records.

Pierre Leempoel, manager stamps production, bpost Belgium, said: ‘Because we consider it a diversity of utmost importance. For the design we called in the designer Ann Bessemans. She used a very special technique: a combination of gridded letters (for the lady’s face) and a digital microtext (for the background). Right away a scoop in stamp land.’

The stamp shows 606 words taken from the ‘The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of discrimination against women’. Pierre continued, ‘An adjudicator sent by Guinness World Records, counted the number of valid words. He did so with an iron hand: incomplete words and words that were too short were dropped. But we lay hold on the world record of ‘stamp having the most readable words’. We actually do not yet know if we will figure in the famous book: only a happy few survive the selection.’

The stamp was printed on a Roland 704 3B P 2/2, and Pierre said, ‘We have been using the four colour press since 2000. It always has been a very reliable machine and accounts for 15% of our production – including the stamp of the new King.

We printed 108,000 sheets of the world record stamp – with five stamps each. They can be used for standard letters to worldwide destinations. If you are interested, you can find them in our Filaboutiques and in our e-shop.’