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

Today's post will deal with the remaining aspects of this issue that were not covered in my first two detailed posts.


Postal Stationery

The postal stationery products available for this issue are reasonably extensive for an issue that saw less than 5 years use, and includes:


Pre-stamped envelopes.Special order envelopes.Post bands.Air LettersPost Cards I will briefly discuss each of these in more detail.
Pre-Stamped Envelopes

During the life of this issue, both #8 and #10 sized envelopes were available that came pre-stamped with either a 3c purple, 4c red or 5c blue image of the basic stamp design. However, there were differences both in the appearance of the Queen's hair, as well as the size of the stamp design. The very first printings of these from 1963 to 1966 had the hair showing as a series of dots. There appears at the present time, to be only one size of stamp design for the 3c and 5c values, but the 4c value is found with both 24mm x 21 mm and 25 mm x 21 mm stamp sizes.…

Overview

Today's post will be much shorter than in the past several weeks and will look at the high value definitive stamps that began to replace the designs of the 1946 Peace Issue, starting with the 50c in 1950. They are interesting stamps because they technically occupy both the end of King George VI's reign, as well as the very beginning of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. So they really ought to be included in your collection if you are a specialist of either reign. Although they do not display quite the same range of paper, shade and gum varieties as the earlier Peace Issue, there are still some worthwhile varieties that can be collected. I will illustrate most of them here, though there is one very dull, cold shade of ultramarine on the $1 fisheries that I do not currently have an example of.

This set is probably not complicated enough on its own to make a lifetime collection, though there is still a decent amount of proof material, which will prove ellusive to a special…

Today's post covers the remaining aspects of this handsome first definitive issue of the King George VI period. 
Booklet Panes and Complete Booklets

Basic Format and Layout





It is with this issue that the collecting of booklets gets really, really interesting. The reason is that a dotted cover design replaced the plain cover designs of the previous issue. Both the front and back covers exist in up to 11 different die types that differ only in terms of the dot pattern. Peter Harris, a dealer in the UK published a detailed study in which he identified the different cover dies that exist on both the English and French booklet covers. As you might expect, the number of potential combinations of front and back covers that exist for each basic booklet is quite high. Another complicating factor, is the width of the staple that was used to fasten the booklet together. This was also the first issue to include pages in the booklets containing information about postage rates. These are called …