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

Today's post comes in response to a request from a reader. Back when I first wrote about this issue, I did not do a detailed post on papers and shades primarily because I wasn't confident that I knew with 100% certainty what the complete list would look like. However, I realize after Gene's request, that something is better than nothing, so here I will attempt to give you a complete list of all the shades and all the perforation combinations for the stamps in this series.

1c Rose

The primary shades that I have seen on this are:


Deep rose carmine, or purplish roseDeep rosePale rose The first shade is from the earliest printings, and is therefore only found perf. 11.75. The second and third shades should cover the entire range of printings and should exist perf. 11.75, 11.75 x 12 and 12. So to my way of thinking there are 7 possible basic stamps:
Deep rose carmine, perf. 11.75, Deep rose, perf. 11.75Deep rose, perf. 11.75 x 12Deep rose, perf. 12Pale rose, perf. 11.75Pale rose, …

In one of my first posts to this blog I wrote about the many misconceptions surrounding catalogue values and how they are often misused by collectors and dealers alike. In this post I wanted to share some of my thoughts as a dealer about the impact that catalogues have had on the hobby in general.

On the plus side, catalogues serve several very useful functions:


They help a collector to become aware of the scope of extant material available in a potential area of collecting interest as well is indicating to a collector the potential level of detail they can get into should they wish to. A collector can view catalogue listings to decide if an area they are potentially interested in collecting will provide enough scope to maintain their interest or not. So they are useful in helping a collector make educated decisions about where they want to concentrate their collecting efforts. They provide information about stamps sufficient to give a collector a working knowledge of a particular phil…

Today's post will look at a field of collecting that has been very neglected, and which I believe offers philatelists an unprecedented opportunity. That field is the collecting of modern postal history. Modern postal history for the purposes of this post is all the postal history for stamps issued during the present reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

What makes this period so interesting? Two things:
1. Frequent postage rate increases. 2. The proliferation of commemorative se-tenant issues and souvenir sheets, many of which were never intended to be used for postage. 
It is important to understand the factors that make a cover scarce and desirable. These factors are the same, no matter what time period we are talking about. There are many, but the main three factors are:
RateRoute and DestinationFranking The rate of the cover is the amount of fees that were required to pay for postage and any other services that were purchased in connection with the delivery, such as special delivery, ac…

Overview

This is the last of my detailed posts dealing with the shades of the very popular Admiral Issue of 1911-1928. The 50c value has four major listed shades in Unitrade, which are not too difficult to distinguish, while the $1 has three. However, one of the difficulties that collectors will encounter when trying to sort their stamps is the fact that there are several sub-shades within many of the major shade groups that may lead to mis-identification for those who are not familiar with the characteristics of the major shade groups.

Like all my other posts on this topic, I will show you examples of stamps from each major Unitrade listed shade group and will then cross-reference the shade names in Unitrade, with shade names from the Stanley Gibbons colour key, modified as necessary when the shades are lighter, darker, brighter, duller, paler or deeper than the Gibbons Colour Key swatches. Unfortunately, my colour key does not have very many black swatches, so most of the names that…

Overview

This is one of the few values in the Admiral series, whose basic colour was not changed throughout the entire life of the issue. The only other stamp which were in use throughout the entire period from 1912 to 1928 was the 50c, which will be discussed in the next post. Unitrade does list several shades of this stamp and most of them have been assigned sub-numbers by Scott. However, I find the names of the colour groups to be misleading, given how different they are from the actual colours, as classified by the Stanley Gibbons Colour Key. The listed shades are:


Olive greenDark olive greenSage greenGrey green This is another value in which it pays to know your paper and gum characteristics. The reason is because what Unitrade is really doing when they list these shades is to list and price particular groups of printings:
The basic #119 is the un-retouched dry printing. Period.This must mean that any wet printing not falling under the sage green or grey green groups is automatical…

Overview

This post will deal with the last of the intermediate value Admiral stamps before I deal with the three high values, the 20c, the 50c and the $1. The Unitrade catalogue until fairly recently did not list any shades at all of the 10c bistre brown, and has only ever listed two shades of the first 10c: plum and reddish purple. As we shall see though, there is a fair range of shades of the first 10c, and also there are more than two shades of the bistre brown as well. In keeping with the structure of all previous posts, I will illustrate examples of each Unitrade listed shade and will then cross-reference the shade names with the Stanley Gibbons Colour Key.

The 10c Plum or Reddish Purple

This stamp was released in January 1912 and replaced the 10c King Edward VII stamp. It's use was primarily for insurance fees on registered mail, bulk mailings of printed matter and parcels. Consequently, it was in fair demand, and a lot of printings were made between 1912 and 1922, when it wa…

Overview

Today's post will deal with the shades of the two re-issues of the 5c and 7c values. Unitrade lists a few shades for the 5c, although as we shall see, there are more than what Unitrade lists, and none of the shades are actually violet, but rather all are either shades of purple or lilac. Curiously, there are only two listed shades of the 7c red brown: red-brown and pale red brown, even though there is a world of difference between the shades of the wet printings and the dry printings. The so called pale red-brown of the 7c dry printing is actually closer to chestnut on the Stanley Gibbons Colour Key, and is quite distinct once you become familiar with it, although if you are not used to seeing it, you could easily miss it and classify it as a common red-brown shade.

Again, in keeping with the format of the previous posts, I will show examples of each shade and will cross reference the Unitrade shade names to the equivalent shades on the Stanley Gibbons Colour key, indicat…