Canadian Philately - The Stamps and Postal History of Canada 1851 to Present by Brixton Chrome

This week's post, my first of the New Year, is the last one that will deal with commemorative issues for a while, as next week I will begin my foray into the complicated 1972-78 Caricature Issue, which I expect will be a very popular series with my readers.

This post deals with just three issues: the Earth Sciences Issue, the Christmas Issue and the Cornelius Krieghoff Issue. Collectors will already be familiar with the fact that there is the Ottawa and Winnipeg tagging on the Christmas issue, and the five constant varieties on the Krieghoff issue. However, as the detailed post on my website illustrates, these three issues are much more complicated than you Unitrade would lead you to believe.

For starters, there are the paper varieties. Each issue was printed on paper having different physical characteristics, in terms of thickness, colour, texture and weave direction. The usual range of fluorescence on the front and back of stamps are found. making for a lot of collectible varie…

This is my last post before my Christmas break, and my second last post before I get into another very long series of posts for the 1972-1978 Caricature Issue. This week, I have explored the first four commemorative issues of 1972. Like the previous issues of 1971, a good grounding in the paper varieties of these stamps will prove to be a very useful reference for the specialist of the 1967-73 Centennial issue, who is trying to sort the 1972 printings of some of the stamps from the 1971 printings, as the stamps of 1972 exhibit characteristics that were not seen on the earlier stamps.

In my detailed post I go through the usual discussions of paper types, fluorescence, gum and perforations. There are several things though about these issues that stand out:


There are more se-tenant stamps being issued again, but this time, they can only be found in horizontal or vertical pairs. There are many fewer varieties of fluorescence on most of these stamps, with most having fewer than 5 varieties…