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

Today's post comes a few days later than scheduled, and will be my last post until October 10. However it deals with a very fruitful and neglected group of stamps: the commemorative issues of 1932-34. This group of stamps were all printed by the British American Bank Note Company using the flat plate method of printing, except for the 3c Ottawa Conference, which was printed using rotary presses. The print quantities were relatively small compared to both the definitive issues at the time as well as later commemorative issues. There are very few collectible shade varieties. However, there are some good paper and gum varieties, imperforates, proof material, plate flaws, plate blocks, first day covers, postal history and of course, because of their size, lots of opportunity to collect cancellations. Centering tends to be poor for these issues, so finding very well centered stamps is a worthy challenge, particularly for the plate blocks. The perforations tended to be 11, which is a ve...

         Today's post will deal with the last two aspects of this issue that I have not yet discussed, as well as providing some additional information about the flat plate and rotary press printings that has been brought to my attention by Julian Goldberg, a philatelist based in Toronto. This information is very interesting and shows that no matter how much you think you know about Canadian philately, there is always something new to learn. The two aspects of this issue I have not yet covered are: The 3c on 2c scarlet provisional surcharge, for which 58,265,000 were issued on June 21, 1932; The 10c George-Etienne Cartier stamp, which replaced the 10c Parliamentary Library stamp on September 30, 1931. 64,300,000 stamps were issued between 1931 and 1935.  At first, these appear to be largely oddball stamps that offer little to interest the collector. However, as we shall see, both stamps exist with a large number of varieties to interest and ch...

In the previous posts, I touched on the fact that there are different paper and gum types that can be found in the stamps printed by the BABN during the 1930-1935 period. Oddly enough Unitrade completely ignores the significance of these, relegating them to nothing more than a footnote - if even that. In actual fact the paper and gum types found during this period can be used to assign specific stamps to different printings by year. Today's post will explain how. In this post, I am only discussing the gum found on issues printed by flat plates, as opposed to rotary plates. Attributes of Paper and Gum In studying the paper and gum used during this period, there are four basic attributes that are of significance: The visibility of the paper mesh to the naked eye, when the stamp is placed face-down on a surface and viewed. It will either be highly visible in the form of coarse mesh, slightly visible in the form of fine mesh, or not visible at all. The colour of the gum. The ...