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!

More MA13 codes, fish and new Regional shades

Here's some freshwater life you won't find on your envelopes. These are the Post Office Presentation Pack editions. Not that you'll see that many of the 'real' ones printed by people on machines in Post Offices either. They'll be illustrated when I get them so you can see the differences which I expect will be the same as for Freshwater Life I and II but you never know.



Another Post And Go issue you may easily miss. This is the Union Flag with a Coronation overprint and with MA13 in the background. These were available only, to my knowledge, at the Stampex Exhibition earlier this month. As it seems unlikely that the same issue will be available with that overprint and in that typeface again, these could be pretty rare.

Two new Regionals appeared from May. They're not Machins, but I like them. All the Regional pictorial designs are getting pretty ancient and I am quite surprised they've lasted as long as they have. These two are Cartor reprints and the olive has become distinctly sage and the Scottish 88p much deeper.

 

As for Machins - you can now look out for a 10p tan, 1st red and 1st Large red, all three from De La Rue counter sheets with MA13 and no code letter and 2nd Large blue with MA13 MBIL from Walsall business sheets. My lists have been updated with these items.

1 March - easily missed firsts

The A4 generic sheets of English and Wales 'pictorial' definitives printed by Cartor don't have elipses in the perforations. They are also the first self-adhesive country pictorial definitives. A bit pricey but you'll need them and kick yourself later for not getting them.