More QEII stamps with the Flying Scotsman

 

The latest prestige book would be a much more pleasant item to have on the top of the pile if it is the final one with QEII content. The content itself, though, with 12 different commemoratives and the now familiar bit still bizarre pane of Machins, is a hotchpotch that rather spoils the overall impression. Plenty of good text and illustrations for the steam train lovers but I don't see why 8 Flying Scotsman stamps were needed as well as a further 4 LNER or associated ones in a different style and format.

As for the Machins, where once there were 12 and then 8 there are now just four and, in this edition, only two denominations. A 20p green and a £2 blue. The head looks slightly paler on the 20p so I would say this is a separate issue for the collection (and, of course, the bar code will indicate its source too) and the £2 is the first from Cartor.

I shall stop collecting these books when King Charles takes over the panels. They are horrendously expensive now and, as I have said on many other occasions, the content is of minimal interest and the stamps merely one-offs which will be listed in catalogues as quite expensive singles but virtually never used as stamps. It will be quite a relief to abandon them. They remind me so much of those advertisements that use to be on the back cover of Sunday Magazines for limited edition sets of pottery, figurines or something. Along similar lines I have complete blue books of the 1977 QEII 25th Anniversary issues with stamps from probably every British Commonwealth country, including the Miniature Sheets and various variations on the theme available at the time. A colleague and I had committed to subscribing to Urch Harris for the whole lot but never anticipated the vast quantities that came our way. We bought the books to store them in, the pages and mounts and the whole thing went on for ever and cost us a fortune. Luckily I had a good income in those days and could afford them in the belief that they would be 'valuable' one day. No chance. I doubt I could sell the books for a tenner each now.

White spots before your eyes. Distinguishing the new 50p and £1.

 

You will see straightaway that the QR codes on the Prestige book stamps are quite different from the sheets issues. For a moment, I thought this would enable us to distinguish one from the other. But no, of course, as each individual stamp will have a different QR code and that will not help after all!

I suppose it is feasible that part of the design might remain constant to reflect the common source but I would need someone to advise me on that one. There will be something in the long string of characters that will be produced but identifying that amongst the mass of white squares is not something I am going to attempt without guidance!

The slight difference in size of the issues here is purely down to my inconsistent cropping of the later images. Apologies. The colour difference should also be ignored.

 

Update 16 June 2022

I am grateful to Lew Paterson for looking at the QR codes for these (and some other) issues. Here are his findings.

The 4 codes for these illustrations are:

JGB S19981017031001847760010025012201 F6B51D5D00FE2D5801

JGB S19941017031004573840010012012201 7A2413CCC098BDEB01

JGB S19981017031000997760005024012201 53FAA4B2899ACD6801

JGB S19941017031005321590005011012201 D1E0328AE6EDE24501


Possibly the first of each pair, has S1998 while the second has S1994 - could these be different source codes? Yep, just tried my own - S1998 is the Prestige sheet while S1994 is the counter sheets

Looking further, the counter, Book of 8, book of 4 and business stamps use S11 for normal stamps and S12 for large stamps with the last 2 digits in the 20s for 2nd class and in the 10s for 1st class.

The new definitives

 

Following the release of 1st and 2nd stamps in the new larger size with barcodes, April sees 14 new stamps with specific values. These come in two styles  - similar to the 1st and 2nd Class stamps, the four new standard rates for various services have a strong-coloured background. The second type is an interesting development, with a white background and the inks just applied to a rectangle border for the stamp and the head and value tablet and barcode, of course.

These are reminiscent of the 2000 issue. Values follow the sensible 1-2-5 principle with a £3 intruder. These are attractive and, with less ink splashing around perhaps they will be even less likely to have mistakes. I'll be looking out for breaks in the border where a pixel or two might be more noticeable than it would have been on a full colour background.

It remains to be seen whether future denominations, and the NVIs, will stay with full colour backgrounds or follow the new series. Whilst these are still Machins, it is a new section in the Machin collection and a welcome opportunity to take a breather and finally re-arrange those that have gone before! I wonder what prestige books will contain? If they also follow the new styles then I need not worry any more about how much space to leave between £1 and £2 denominations!

The Big Stamp with a Barcode

 

Just as you may have thought that there wouldn't be much more of interest in Machins, along comes the Big 2nd. It's big because it is 38mm x 30mm including perforations. the 'stamp' part, excluding perforations is 22½mm x 28mm compared to 18mm x 22mm for the familiar size stamp area.

Separated by a rather bizarre printed 'perforation' line is a panel containing what I believe is now referred to as a 2D barcode. I still call these things, whether square or rectangular, QR codes and the app on my phone is a QR reader but, whatever you wish to call it, this is a big new addition.

Each of these panels contains a set of characters which will be unique for each label. The one illustrated above and below have these sets of characters:

JGBS1123101703 114139229 00066 231120 01 D7F8DD75094BEF1 501

JGBS1123101703 123311783 00066 040121 01 140D0D76722095E 501

Messrs. B Alan Ltd have made some intelligent guesses as to the translation of some of these and you will be able to identify a date and a value fairly easily. One was printed on 23/11/2020 and the other 04/01/21, both having a denomination at the time of 66p.

There are other educated guesses they make regarding the position of the label on a sheet of labels but that's about as far as anyone can go. 

This label I can envisage having several purposes as well as the obvious security function. It will prevent the label being used twice without penalty when scanned by new reading devices at sorting offices. I am sure this happens a lot at the moment with very few of my stamps ever being franked or marked. The security slits do make them difficult to take off an envelope but I have seen plenty of instances where the stamp and backing have just been cut out and stuck on another envelope. You may think this is an obvious ruse but how do we know that someone simply needed to use a different envelope and the transfer is entirely innocent? So that's one purpose.

Another could be to enable us to track items to which this label has been applied. I can see an app being launched in time to come which will let us see where our post may or may not be

Something no-one has mentioned so far that I have seen is the possible effect of including a denomination. For many years we have been able to hoard piles of NVI stamps and defer payment of new higher rates. When a particularly large increase is announced in advance then there is a great incentive to go and buy as many as you can as the stock will be worth considerably more a few weeks later. I am sure people have done this and even sold sheets at a price to businesses that still represents a discount on the new rate but gives the seller a worthwhile profit. This new code will, however, specify an amount - 66p in this case - and I can well imagine that this could determine the 'value' of the label when used in part-payment of postage and, more significantly, in future when 2nd Class postage may increase to, say, 70p and we'll be asked for another 4p, or whatever the difference happens to be at the time.

It is suggested that the Big size is not a permanent thing and that the stamp area may reduce to normal size, with a proportionately smaller label to the side, and that this concept may be spread across some other denominations. 

I can imagine that there was much debate about whether to include the wavy line to imitate perforation and those promoting this won. Here's what a 1st Class might look like without it!

The second printing that I have of the 2nd Class issue has a slightly different shade and a much more reflective ink for the background. This does not show in these scanned images, however, but is most noticeble in daylight at an angle.

Both issues bear the normal code M21L MBIL.

Back down to normal size, there is a 21 code 1st Class Business sheet issue. M21L MBIL.

The 10p light tan has a bright fluor. Still M20L MAIL code.

A noticeably brighter shade of bright blue for this 2nd Class issue, from business sheets.

More 20 codes

 

1st Large Royal Mail red M20L MBIL

I am not sure why this is different to the stamp featured in the last article. Maybe the backing paper has the text reversed, which I don't list separately, and it has come by mistake.

The £2.42 value now has the very bright fluor that has been appearing a lot recently and is very noticeable with a UV torch but not without so if this doesn't concern you that's probably another you needn't buy.

You will need this one, finally getting its M20L MAIL code.

And this, the first appearance of M20L MSIL

And this, the first appearance of M20L MBIL

More 20 codes and some thin paper

 Here we have a few more 20 year codes and a couple of variations for the 1st Class red shade and its thinning backing paper.

M20L MTIL Much thinner backing paper

M20L MCIL Deeper red Queen's head from Sherlock book, also thin backing paper with very bright fluorescence

2p Dark Green with M20L MAIL

20p Bright green with M20L MAIL

M20L MBIL very bright fluor with a yellow tint

More 20 Codes and a Challenge.

Here's a challenge. Find a Special Delivery stamp in the Royal Mail online shop. I failed. Anyway, here is my own 500g example with the latest M20L code. This ranks as the #1 high value stamp currently available with what I think is a £7.50 value at the time of writing. The service is more expensive if you need more insurance cover and I wonder whether the same stamp gets used in such an instance, in which case it would have an even higher value! Or, now I think about it, maybe if used for the Guaranteed by 9am service, it would be the highest ever, easily exceeding the old £10 definitive.

Next, there are some more 20 codes. I don't seem to have noted the arrival of the 1st and 2nd Class stamps or their Large siblings as M20L MAIL in previous posts. There is also now a 2nd M20L MBIL which I seem to have missed. So here they are now, together with a 10p light tan.

The only other item of interest is a 1st Class from a recent Concrete & Clay book (4+2) which has a quite different and thinner backing which is also very bright when viewed under UV compared to others. It may have appeared before but this is from the Queen edition and is the first I've noticed.

Apologies for the poor quality images in this post. Having already put the stamps away neatly in my albums I was reluctant to undo all my work and risk not being able to remember what should go where so I just used my mobile phone and did not wait for it to focus on some occasions. But you've all seen plenty of 10p stamps and the different codes don't even show on most of them anyway. I should have used old images and no-one would have noticed.

End of WWII, Queen and some definitives

 I am rather late returning to this news blog and I shall just publish what I have found lying around and it may be necessary to explain later, add more or delete duplications.

6 April saw the issue of this miniature sheet to celebrate the Declaration of Arbroath. Not Machins but I include the small definitives in my lists and these will all be new being inter alia on gummed paper as well as having [correction, I'd forgotten that these have not made it to self-adhesive world yet!] pretty much the same as sheet issues but with maybe small design differences I have yet to spot. There are sheets with and without a bar code.

£1.63, £1.68 and £2.42 definives with M20L codes have also appeared in my post box. I shall have to conduct an enquiry as to how these differ from the 17 March issues (if at all). I may have to remove these, just bear with me in the meantime as I am a little behind! [Update: these are March 2020 printings and seem to have a slightly deeper shade of Queen's head, although I suspect that there is a more significant difference between the results of my scanning these and the original issues.)

The 1st large Signed For now has an M20L code, first appearing around March - April.

From the End of The War book, issued 8 May we have three new Machins: 5p, 50p and £1.63 by Cartor, all on gummed paper and coded M20L MPIL.

Two more Concrete & Clay books with 1st in quite distinctly different shades of red. Quite how each compares to the 'normal' shade I have yet to investigate but one will match and another won't, for sure. These are all M20L MCIL of course and not necessarily new unless the shade of one or the other is of interest.

Another prestige book, issued 9 July, brings the band Queen to the attention of all those who collect prestige books. This will certainly make searches on Google more complicated than before. The definitive pane would be better referred to as the definitive size pane as it features the lowest ever combined value of Machins in all the history of prestige books. (I think that is true, although I am now wondering about the content of the Cookbook!) Expect a revision of this bit too in due course, with evidence.

What we have here are four 1p purples for no reason at all that I can think of, with four 1st class definitive size stamps with a photograph of the four band members as they were in the 1970s, all surrounding a strange label from one of the album covers.

I shall have to list all this stuff but I would really be quite happy not to see another prestige book. Whereas once I would have been writing to The Times and all and sundry to complain if a prestige book came out without a Machin pane, now I would welcome it. I would neither have to buy nor concern myself with what is a mere money-making item for Royal Mail and of practically no postal use. Yes, we can use the stamps but I have only admiration for those of you who collect just used stamps and who don't cheat by buying two books and sending the contents of one to yourself or good friends!

Not that that would stand that great a chance of a decent postmark anyway. These days it would be more likely to arrive either just as clean as it left you a few days before or with some heavy scrawl across it courtesy of your postman obeying one of many instructions to help prevent re-use of unmarked stamps.

Back in the 1970s my dear old friend Ugo Vincent could be seen making his way slowly from Abbots to Kings Langley in Hertfordshire where the good people behind the counter in Kings Langley Post Office would spend a great deal of time carefully placing round handstamps on the stack of envelopes he prepared for his stamp collecting friends. Yes, my used collection of late 1960s to late 1970s GB issues are very finely used indeed!