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

Hello everyone. I wanted to apologize for the fact that I will be unable to write any new posts for the next 2-3 weeks. I feel that I owe all my regular and loyal readers an explanation for why I am having to delay my posts, so here goes. When I started out as a stamp dealer and blogger, my intention was to focus all my attention and energy on building the best stamp stock that I could, writing top quality content and getting into a position to be able to service collectors from all over the world. This is no easy task, as I have written about many times in the past. So, when it came to deciding how I wanted to build a business online, I thought that paying a company like e-bay to take care of all the information technology, transaction processing, marketing etc. would make sense. I really thought that e-bay would act like a business partner and help my business grow, in exchange for the $500-$700 I was paying them every month. I was wrong. Dead wrong. E-bay is a member of a g...

With over a year in the making, this series of posts is finally entering the home stretch, with the last four values of the set: the 20c, 25c, 50c and $1. This week I will deal with all the printings of the 20c value, which depicts "The Ferry Quebec" by J.W. Morrice. It is one of the less complicated values in the set, at least according to Unitrade. However, as we shall see, there is still plenty of scope to interest the specialist. Interestingly, none of the high values from this point forward exist with general Ottawa tagging. This value exists only Winnipeg tagged. According to Unitrade, the printings with dextrine gum were in use from February 8, 1967, when the set was first issued, until May 1972, when the printings with PVA gum replaced them. The life of these later printings was very brief, as the 20c Prairies from the Caricature Issue was issued on September 8, 1972. The Winnipeg tagged stamps appeared on December 9, 1969, on cream paper with dextrine gum, and the...

Today, I finish off my examination of the 15c Bylot Island stamp from the series, with an exploration of the printings made using PVA gum. Unfortunately I do not have some of the scarcer paper varieties on hand, so my descriptions will be less than complete, and I will have to add examples as they become available. Unitrade lists four varieties of the untagged stamps, three of which are very scarce, and does not list any plastic flow varieties, even though they clearly do exist on the untagged PVA gum printings, as well as on the dextrine gum printings. I have started to use the term dextrine rather than dextrose after David Gronbeck-Jones, the famous Centennial issue specialist and author pointed out to me that dextrose is the sugar from which the dextrine gum is made. The tagged stamps are listed by Unitrade as existing with both Winnipeg tagging and General Ottawa tagging, on both dull and low fluorescent papers, for a total of 4 basic varieties. All of these exist, of course wit...