The little boy in the village test - Part 2

In my last article I tried to explain why I would not be collecting or listing quite a large range of Post And Go issues - the ones that I really don't feel have ever been 'available' to anyone other than the people who sell them.

Now I am extending that still further, from the limited issue Machin definitive Post And Gos to the overprints that, by and large, were also only available at exhibitions and fairs. The same logic works for them. I never actually liked them anyway as it seemed that commercial organisations were getting space on stamps. I have nothing against Stampex, The BPMA and the like but simply don't see why they need to promote themselves on what I had thought were British definitive issues. That, of course, is where I had gone wrong. They aren't definitive issues. They are specialist labels that happen to be printed on similar backing to the stamps available to the public and whilst they can be used postally they really never seem to be. I mean, there are few enough of any Post And Gos on our post these days as it is, never mind the chances of encountering one of these with an overprint as well.

Mr Gibbons says that overprints were only available from those limited outlets but I am not so sure about that. I believe there may be one or two that have been more freely available to the public and it is important that we don't chuck out the valid collection babies with the specialist bath water.

I am going to have a bit of a job figuring out which to keep in the list and may remove all to start with and re-introduce any deserving cases when I get to know about them from my research. I know there are some real experts out there and maybe they might like to help. Clearly whoever has been advising Mr Gibbons knows his stuff but I feel he might have advised a little more carefully on one or two items, even if they were not likely to get far out in the wild. They might have reached my little boy in the village. His Granny might just have happened to buy one from a machine somewhere.

OK, point taken, let us assume, please, that Granny is not a Stampex fan.

So most of my overprint listings are going to disappear from the sheet and end up on Ebay in a week or so, along with the 'scarce' Machin types too.

Now, you're wondering. What on Earth is he going to do about the pictorial issues?

Well, I had previously abandoned the silly Presentation Packs. While they had specially printed versions that no-one is ever going to use on a letter and which are just going to stay in a plastic envelope then they seem no more than an advert. If anything, the Post Office should be giving these to us collectors, maybe when we buy a real set or something. But they are definitely pointless. There may be some examples where real labels, the same as those available to buy, are in the packs and they can stay. I haven't thought yet which might be in this category, if any!

Now I have to accept that the 'normal' ones are pretty much like the commemorative or special issues we've all got used to seeing. I gave up collecting them many years ago and really have not missed anything. Looking at the prices, too, there appears to be nothing of much value either, many sets from recent years being available at less than face value if you look hard too! The only real interest I had in the pretty ones was the variation in font styles that existed and the fact that some came with Worldwide 40g or whatever. Because they didn't commemorate anything they fooled me into regarding them as a bit 'definitive'. I had often written in years gone by about what might replace Machins and pretty stamps like these illustrations seemed likely candidates. So when they appeared I was a bit taken in. Now I just see them as labels with six different pictures on. Heavens! Remember the days when we felt we needed to have each value with each denomination. Mr Alan still supplies these as they are, indeed, different. I even got some for a couple of issues but at £77 for each set - and there were, of course, two types - that was way out of order. I think now what else I could have bought with £154. A really nice old Victorian stamp. Some mint early high values. All kind of lovely - and much safer as investment - stuff too.

So I am going to continue listing the pretty issues - those that are available generally, that is. Most of them are, I believe. It is the Flags and Robins that have complicated geneology but I'll figure it out eventually. I don't want to collect them myself, though, so my collection of all kind of weird and wonderful items - some with huge fonts and missing text but mostly just fairly boring - will be on Ebay soon too. That includes the 72 items I mentioned and also there are 30 Birds III with the wrong font I which I paid nearly £300 for. Good grief. Some nice items coming  for those of you in that Specialist pen in the field!

That will leave me with just the public issue Machins and one or two others. A modest collection but, to be quite honest, that's all these particular Post And Gos are going to be - a modest collection of items available for a while before something more permanent comes along.

I might have been inclined to think that the new NCR type Post And Gos would be that new something. However, Mr Gibbons doesn't mention them. That may be because they were issued too late for his catalogue. I personally think he hadn't decided at the time so just took the easy option! Mr Alan has placed his cards firmly on the table, though. "They're not stamps," he says. Apparently that's because they can only be supplied one at a time and have to be used straightaway. I reckon they're much more like a 'stamp' to the little boy in the village than any of those hundreds of pounds worth of Wincor, or was it Hytech, font style 2 with short phosphor and value overlapping the picture that came from one machine on a Tuesday in a room on the third floor of a building in York.

I am quite surprised that neither Mr Alan nor Mr Gibbon are supporting the NCR invasion. As I see it, machines are being enthusiastically installed at more and more Post Offices and they are, of anything, the most likely to be actually seen on some post. They replace the white printed labels type which I agree were never stamps as such. Interestingly, I have seen piles of the big gold Horizon labels. They have been very successful and if these NCR labels were to be used for the Horizon purposes too then that would be very interesting.

It is difficult when there could be so many values available but isn't that part of the fun of collecting? Dealers could do well supplying the full range for those who go for the easy route of collecting by standing order. Who knows, maybe Tallents House will beat them all to it! I detected some surprise at their issue of a 'Collectors' Pack' with five examples of them, describing them as Post And Gos in the write-up.

So I shall be listing these as best I can, with limited awareness of what is coming out and when but I'll try to get some information. Offers of help gratefully welcomed!

While I am on the subject of collecting stamps I have been feeling for some time now like one of those old people that collects decorated plates and gets a new one every month on standing order. They cost far more than she'll ever get back and they're never going to be used as plates. I may have cut out the special issues but I still get the Prestige books. I have always been taken in by these splendidly produced little booklets and would rush to see what was in that Machin definitive pane. I seldom noticed what else was in the book. For a while, these books were quite desirable and fetched good prices. After the first one or two, though, few of the stamps got used and more recently that became highly unlikely when they were priced at a figure higher than the sum of their contents. These books are the old lady's plates. They look lovely, can be quite interesting but the only reason I have been getting them is to have examples of those two or three variations of definitives or Regional issues that they contain. I know they'll never see the light of a postal day but the completeness drug is difficult to quit. What I need to do, I think, is keep the pane but use or the rest or sell them. Once a book's content might be predominantly Machin definitives, with several panes, but now it is usually just the single pane with special issues occupying most of the panes. So where before it might have made sense to keep the whole book - because it comprised just the panes I wanted to keep and because it had a significant value intact - now I am not so sure that is the case. One or two will always be a bit special but many may struggle on the open market to return face value. So I may just as well keep the ones I need for the definitive completeness and sell the rest.

Looking at most of the output for us collectors now, we really are being regarded by the marketing boys as the little old ladies with plates rather than the little boy in the village. We'll take without much question whatever comes out, stick it in a box, an album or wherever things go nowadays and not think a great deal more about it. The only real stamps are the definitives and a few special issues that get issued at post office counters or put in books that people buy day to day and that eventually get stuck on envelopes and packages. Like the normal definitives, some Post And Gos, some NCRs, even Horizon labels - the things the little boy in the village will want. The rest is pure income generation. We all need to wise up a bit.

You know what would make a really cool stamp collection? What we did when we were little - collect used stamps. Now that was collecting. What we do now is just buying. Anyone can do that, especially when you get old and haven't so many other things to pay for.

That's what the little boy in the village should want. Stamps that may cost nothing. Dealers can still supply ones to fill the gaps - and there'll be a lot of those if his mail looks anything like mine.

Definitely definitive?

One of the fundamentals about collecting stamps is the desire to gather complete sets of issues. We can argue about the depths of desire involved - the extent to which we are prepared to overlook minor changes - but that completeness is a key feature. Whilst my main interest is Machins, I have also regarded what used to be clearly definitive issues as a vital part of my collection and the occasional forays the Post Office made into non-Machin designs were essential additions.

The 1d black anniversary issues, therefore, required no second thought - even though they commemorated something, they were the same size and, of course, what they commemorated was indeed the ultimate definitive itself! They were also Machins in my view, and most others', from the start anyway so that was a simple decision.

The Greetings stamps that first appeared in 1989 were fun and didn't commemorate anything but then neither had Birds or a host of preceding theme-like issues so in my mind at the time they were a separate and non-definitive group. Similarly, Christmas stamps didn't bother me in the slightest. Until the flag one appeared.

First there was this one:

and later this one:

The first flag came with a similarly sized sunflower, Hello, Love, Teddy and the robin in a letter box. I was just about able to dismiss those as 'Greetings' or 'Christmas' and safely non-definitive but the flag bothered me, especially as it was the right size.

Definitives had also, almost exclusively, been that small standard size so something else appearing in those dimensions triggered 'definitive' in my brain in late 2005 and has been firing queries ever since. I was, however, I now recall, quite happy to dismiss the bigger horizontal format flag issues as not definitive so I think I have finally satisfied that portion of my mind that was asking questions at inconvenient moments and worrying me about that completeness thing.

Douglas Myall, the Lord of all that is Machin, wrote in the September 2012 Philatelic Bulletin on this subject and, whilst he made excellent points there, he concluded with "In my view, an important feature of a definitive is that the main element of the design must be a portrait of the monarch". I have trouble with that conclusion as it would imply that the Castles High Values, from 2/6 to the £5 in 1988 and later reproduced as a miniature sheet in 2005 were not definitives whereas I would never have thought they could be anything but definitive.

My logic for that statement further helps my sorting out my brain too; if you needed a 10/- stamp in those earlier days then the blue Castle 10/- was what the Post Office gave you. There wasn't anything else. So it was the definitive 10/- stamp. If you are in Northern Ireland and wander into a Post Office and ask for a 1st Class stamp then the chances are that you'll be handed a small standard size green stamp with fields on. There hasn't been any other Northern Ireland 1st Class stamp since 1998 (ignoring the one-off Design book in 2000 which produced a unique 1st NI Machin!). So I would call that pretty definitive. Maybe that's a good name: Pretty definitives!

I remember writing back in 1999, when there were thoughts that the Machin series might end, that I wouldn't mind seeing sets of new definitives for each country featuring buildings or views so the Northern Ireland issues sat happily as definitives, as did the other non-Machin Regionals. I suppose that if I were to extend that thought further then one would have to consider again anything vaguely 'national' that isn't commemorating anything as definitive. Heavens, that would bring in the 2005 Farm Animal stamps which are even the right size! And those flags.

Well, it might, I say to myself hurriedly, had they been the prime items that would have been supplied to requests for a particular denomination stamp. But they weren't. Even the ubiquitous Hello stamps didn't manage that status, although selling them in booklets did make them pretty popular. But not definitive. The Machins have always been that. That's not to say you can only have the one definitive at a time for any denomination or that it has to be widely available or we'd have trouble with many items that were only available for a short period but were none the less very much definitives.

So, until it looks as though a new series is going to replace the Machins, all these others are also-rans in the Definitive Stakes. Despite Royal Mail calling the Olympic small size 1st and Worldwide stamps 'definitives', they're not. In fact, they don't require any second thoughts - they're celebrating the Olympics and came out to do so and have now gone. Not exactly definitive behaviour so I shall ignore that classification by our friends at Royal Mail and put it down to an alcoholic lunch by the staff at Tallents House one day when they were preparing the literature. As Douglas Myall points out, though, if you had 'special issues' only on your standing order with Tallents House you would not have received those Olympic ones which were, however, distributed to those, like myself, with a 'definitive' standing order!

The National Castles issues that featured pictures of castles as labels with a 1st Class Welsh red and green dragon, English flag and Scotland's saltire are close calls in the definitive debate. (They left Northern Ireland with just the familiar definitive fields.) It's that flag thing again. I may just defer a decision on those, although, as they were not exactly commonly available to the casual purchaser at the Post Office counter, I probably won't have too much trouble assigning them elsewhere, maybe best along with their bigger horizontal format cousins.

That does seem to have cleared my head a great deal, which was the purpose of the article.

It has also greatly reduced my imminent expenditure on necessary catch-ups as I hadn't been getting the Smiler sheets for many years. As all the items I have been debating were also issued in Smiler sheets that would have brought a whole new printer being required to be collected into the frame along with the DLRs or Walsalls for the mainstream versions where they existed. I have spent best part of a day rummaging through dealers' annoyingly badly designed websites trying to get a complete list of all the printings of the all the candidates for my catalogue in this section and that list was growing rapidly, as were the prices of some of the early items I may well have missed. Then, of course, I would need to find the equivalent DLR or Walsall versions and everything seemed to be in sheets or panes when I just wanted singles. So having decided not to include them that is one big relief!

I think, despite some of the logic I appear to have developed, what actually decided me were all those Farm Animal stamps, of which I recall seeing about three in total in use and which I have been extremely reluctant to grant the same status as a good many decent contenders, let alone as genuine definitives. They lacked class, presence, that je ne sais quoi that British definitive stamps should bear. I would have really stuggled with New Baby issues and the seemingly never-ending stream of ruddy sheets from this or that place featuring the Hello stamps. I am really not very concerned that Indonesia is doing something and rather question the need to say Hello to whatever it is. That's the way I feel about most commemoratives - I can take them or leave them, however well designed some may be. So that Smilers list can grow and grow for all I care and Cartor can have special techniques, apps and sheets of all sorts and I can happily ignore them for a while, except for the occasions when they do feature their version of a real definitive, of course.

I was about to relax and finish this when I looked through the lastest material from Royal Mail. Dragonflies take up three pages in the February Bulletin!  These Post and Gos are serious business, and that's not just in terms of income generation for Royal Mail either. Could they be the future definitive? If so, then, by definition, these early examples of the product in development will become definitive in retrospect. I have already included the Machin head and printed rate ones as definitives, as has Douglas Myall. What do I do about the Birds and the Bees, sorry ... dragonflies? If we take my casual person who wanders into Post Offices then he or she may well find they're dispensed one with a pretty picture by default. If they have to choose that then it's not a definitive. But if it gets doled out to them in some sort of Definitive of the Day fashion, then my argument breaks down.

Just as I was prepared to envisage scenes of Britain becoming a definitive issue in the course of time, so could these Birds, Farm Animals and whatever else they have up their sleeves. If these things had remained an oddity, produced only at a few locations and seldom to be seen except on Ebay, then I would have no problem not bothering about them. They do seem to be getting more widespread, though, and if 143 machines (or whatever the number of locations where they're available is now) grow it is feasible that they could become the new definitive label. Note I didn't use the term stamp. If they do supercede the Machins we know and love then we'll want to have had all those early ones. 

I am belatedly getting the non-pictorial ones in each denomination and type but not the overprints. As for the pictorials, I can't take the risk that they don't fade away so I'll get 1st Class examples of each to start with. 36 for each set would be a bit much, I feel. Royal Mail has the three Farm Animals issues and the Flag issue so it is only the 4 Birds I need at this time. Birds 1,3 and 4 are available at only slightly above cost but Birds 2 seems pricey. I have a bid on that so hopefully that will bring me up to date. 

One encouraging thing is that the numbers of these Post and Gos being sold, and the frequency of change, coupled with what I suspect will be inevitable tweaks to the machines, paper, printing etc. as they develop, ought to make them attain higher prices in future than normal commemoratives, if that's what they do turn out to be in the end, and that little bit more collectible. I can't say I'm excited at all about deciding to add them but it will be fascinating perhaps to return to this article, or have someone land on it in future, when wondering whatever happened to Post and Gos and were they ever definitives?!

Postscript:

Of course, Royal Mail's site announces that it is 'unavailable' when I try to pay for the items this evening! Typical. It's not a good site at all for collectors. Poor images and terrible navigation.

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.