February 22, 2014

Walsall + Cartor = ISP - Courvoisier

A new prestige booklet is out this month - Classic locomotives of Great Britain. Royal Mail know very well that there steam engine fans are inevitably either stamp collectors or unable to resist nice stamps with trains on them!

It's an OK sort of book and a better topic than some we have had but what interests me is the definitive pane. I do wonder just how many prestige books they would sell if there wasn't a definitive pane! 


The Philatelic Bulletin announces that these were printed by International Security Printers. That's a new name to me. I must have missed an article or news about this but discovered from a quick search that Walsall bought Cartor and, together with another France-based printing firm, Courvoisier, formed ISL as an umbrella group for this sort of quality and security work.

So, to all intents and purposes, the stamps are printed by Cartor, on the same equipment as before, so the 2p and 5p may not be new Machins, nor may the pictorial Regionals be new either. We'll have to wait and see as no doubt someone much more technically informed of the process will tell us before long.



I don't see any changes for these 1st class reds, the latest foursome in what is now a fairly permanent feature of 2+4 in a booklet. What makes this booklet amusing is the strange alien / ghost-like image to the wright of the footballer on the blue panel! It may not be obvious on first glance and you may even find that you have to view the actual stamp to see it but it is definitely odd - an unintentionally so!


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