Collecting on a Shoestring 2

Experienced collectors always say that one should always purchase and collect the best available stamp or cover available. But always remember that most normal people have a restricted budget.

Some of these “experts” then proceed to do the exact opposite by collecting rather tatty, torn, water stained or partially burned items. These damaged items are collectable crash or accident mail and are the survivors of plane, train or ship accidents. Items from some of the more famous accidents such as the Hindenburg crash/fire are highly sought after. These are stories in themselves and take in researching the causes of the accident, who were involved in the accident, why were they there, was there a special stamp or cancel for the journey and so on.

What about the mail that drops through our letter box? If it is like anything like the mail that drops through mine, stamps are rare. Most of the items have their carriage paid either by meter or PPI (Post Paid Impression). So, at first glance, these envelopes can be dropped straight in to the great grey receptacle. However, take a closer look at the envelopes as there may be a strange story behind each of these dull items.

Postal operations add marks which assist in getting the item from sender to recipient and by “reading” these markings, one can build up a picture of the route taken. The difficulty arises from developing the skills to do so.

Metered mail, in the UK, receives either a red or blue inked impression giving the rate paid by the sender. In the impression, one gets a date stamp, possibly a slogan and there is a serial number identifying the machine and even the model!

Coding marks applied to automate the sorting of mail can through light on why the envelope may have been delayed, which machine was used to code it and where, date and time information and even an unique identifier for that item of mail. With some older processed items it may actually be possible from records to identify the person on the coding desk.

Postmarks have long been seen as the quickest and easiest way to track a mail item. The sending office puts a postmark cancelling the stamp. Sometimes intermediate offices may also apply a cancel mark and the receiving office may also have added the mark too.

Back to basic stamp collecting. Mint stamps appear to be promoted as the way to collect. These stamps should automatically be in the best condition since they are obtained direct from source and not subsequently used and abused by the postal service. They also make a nice display without those “nasty black smudgy cancels” to spoil the aesthetics.

First Day Covers (FDCs) are more bulky but are a very easy method of getting the stamps used with a clear cancel that also documents the first day of use of the stamps. However, these days, many FDCs are not first day as such. Philatelic bureaux prepare and cancel covers in advance of the issue to meet the prospective orders. In the UK, at least, there are about half a dozen Special Handstamp Centres (SHCs) which accept first day items up to a couple of weeks after the day of issue to allow for the “vagaries of the post”. In addition, these centres offer a range of special cancels which have relevance to the stamp issue and not just the place of posting.

Used stamps are exactly what they appear to be. They have been used to prepay the postage of an item. They have weathered the “hardships” of the postal services and received markings en route. Worst of all are the stamps attacked by the over zealous postie with a biro. This totally devalues the stamps as being collectable but some collectors do actually add such items to their collection as complete envelopes to show what can go wrong.

Collectors soak these stamps off the envelope and dry using blotting paper. However, self adhesive stamps which have become more popular over the last decade tend not to be able to be removed from the envelope by soaking and the best way to deal with them is to cut round the stamp. If there is a clear cancel then cut around the stamp and cancel.

So to finish this entry, it is possible to piece together a story from the envelope and how it passed through the systems. This can add to the story given by the image on the stamp.

Capex -Canadian International Philatelic Exhibition

I am trying to reorganise parts of my accumulation of stamps into a more logical format. To this end, I am mounting material onto white A4 card and placing the cards in protective plastic wallets in a ring binder. It is probably not the best way to mount material but it works reasonably well.

Circa 1997, there was a car boot sale in a local park. I went grudgingly but I did find a stall where someone was selling off some covers. I managed to buy the bulk of the Canadian material for about £20 which was all that I had on me. I had examples of the majority of the covers but what made them interesting was that they had postmarks other than the Canadian Philatelic Bureau one.

Amongst the covers was the cover illustrated below. It has the CAPEX sheet issued by the USPS. It is on what appears to be an envelope from the organisers. On the left of the envelope are printed three Victorian stamps and a maple twig similar in design to that shown on the sheet.

 

The stamps illustrate eight examples of North American wildlife including the blue jay, chipmunk and raccoon. The cancel is of CAPEX Station, United States Postal Service, Toronto and is dated 15 June 1978.

Note that Mr Zip, the postman, appears on the selvage. Mr Zip was introduced to help promote the use of the American version of the post code - the zipcode. The zip code initially had five digits but was later extended to zip+4 to improve the flexibility of the system and extend its usefulness in getting mail to more local areas.

Collecting on a Shoe String 

I have been collecting stamps for more than 50 years. I started when I was five. I have rarely had the cash to splurge on my collecting interests. So I think that I might be qualified enough to say something about building a collection on a restricted budget.

During the Olympics, I became involved in correspondence with a dealer on his blog site over the confusion surrounding the Gold Medal Winners’ stamps and the expense involved for completeness. There were six printers (with another three on standby) and four different margins per winner. With 29 gold medallists this mounts to 696 sheetlets each at £3.60. If one bought an example of each, it would cost £2505.60 (plus what ever appeared from the back up printers).

One aspect of the conversation was over buying material that one can afford over what was expected. The confusion mentioned above centred round whether the Post Office would sell single stamps instead of the sheetlet with six stamps. Some offices did sell single while others didn’t. The format suggested that the complete sheetlet of six stamps would be the norm mint or on first day covers. It would also suggest that dealers would only be interested in purchasing the complete sheetlets rather than individual stamps.

This dilemma over buying “commercial” or what fits with your collection is as old as stamp collecting. Dealers often use the “commercial” excuse for fixing buying and selling prices – “you have to the set because it is not commercial for us break up the set because we cannot sell the rest if you take that one stamp”.

National and international exhibitions often show the expensive and the exotic – the material that the normal person would rarely find let alone afford to purchase. This had lead to the suggestion that those that can afford it are “buying” the top honours in the philatelic world.

Therefore, unless you have just won big in the Euro-lottery, money is a limiting factor in building up a collection.

I started collecting by ripping around the stamps on the envelopes that arrived from family overseas. These were stored in a box. My bought me my first album. It was about C5 is size and consisted of about 32 pages. She also gave me a couple of packets of stamps. Any pocket money was spent at Woolworths on the 6d and 1/- packets of stamps that were available in the early 1960s.

In high school, I joined the stamp club which introduced me to first day covers and, a since then, first day covers is how I end to collect GB stamps. For a while I could also purchase a second mint set plus a few other GB “collectable” formats.

Gradually, my collection got to the stage where I had most of the “affordable” material from the three countries that I concentrated on – GB, Canada and the US. While at University, I joined the city philatelic society. This added to my knowledge but it also showed that there was no way that I could compete with some of the other members on material but it opened my eyes to possibilities.

One member regularly displayed material that could best be described at material from the waste paper basket. It met most of the criteria for philatelic study but failed on its relatively common status but it appealed to me.

So what was this material? In the 1970’s new Mechanised Letter Offices were coming on stream throughout the country. Coding desks were being installed which would allow the operator to put a dot code on to the envelope which would then speed up the sorting of the mail downstream. The dot code was a simple binary code corresponding to either the postcode or an extract of the post town. In addition an inked code number or letter was usually added which identified the desk and, hence, the operator.

To me this was a totally new area to collect. It had the advantage that the majority of material could be obtained almost for free by asking people to keep the whole envelope for you or you could simply go round the office at the end of the day and pick out the envelopes from the bin. It offered the opportunity to become involved with new postal technology almost from the beginning.

Since then, I have joined the Postal Mechanisation Study Circle and ended up editing their monthly newsletter.

What to Collect

 The choice as to what to collect is up to you. I collect GB stamps because of where I live, Canada because of family, USA because of a gift of a bundle of US stamps and Postal Mechanisation because it was cheap, readily available and novel (when I started). I also have fair collections of India and Poland because of contacts made, Algeria through family and friends and Denmark because of a kiloware purchase or two.

There are two main choices – single country or theme. 

Single country collections are probably easiest to research and build. The choice of country may be determined by family, a visit to that country or even a gift of material. It may be a place that you would like to visit and, through its stamps, one gets a potted history, geography and cultural lesson.

A listing of stamps issued can readily be obtained from a stamp catalogue which may be purchased or obtained, on loan, from a library. Catalogues may give dates of issue, perforation varieties, overprints, miniature sheets in basic detail or as extensive listings depending on the catalogue.

In the UK, the most used catalogues are produced by Stanley Gibbons. They produce a range covering from simplified to very detailed studies on single countries. In the US, the Scott catalogue rules.

With thematic collecting, one builds up a collection on some subject that interests you. It could be a history of aviation, flowers, cats, ships, prisoner of war mail or a multitude of other subjects. There are catalogues available for some themes. Many have been put together by collectors and made available to all. Alternatively, one could just start with a “world” catalogue and work one’s way through it making your own listing.

So now that you have decided what to collect, what do you do next? Again that depends again on the material you want to include. There are conventional stamp albums, stock books and cover albums.

Conventional stamp albums come in many forms. There are basic ones with country names printed at the top of the page. Stamps are stuck in using stamp hinges on the appropriate page. Blank page albums are probably the most flexible. Again stamps are put in using hinges. Special “hinges” known as Hawid strips are used for mint stamps. Postcards, envelopes, photographs and ephemera may be mounted using photo corners – not the double sided ones.

Stock books are commonly used for mint stamps and stamp booklets and cover albums are used for first day covers, postcards, etc.

You have now chosen to collect a single country. You have a listing of what stamps have been issued by that country. If like me, it is a second or third hand catalogue supplemented by photocopies from more modern editions. This allows you to sort out what you may already have chronologically. These can then be mounted on the page of your album – say one page per issue.

With a thematic collection, each page may be allocated to a particular subject – stamps depicting manx or Persian cats; roses or pansies; Concorde or Spitfire; and so on. The more one gets into the subject, the more one can “specialise” the subject – Spitfire mark 9 or mark 22 and so on. Or you may just decide to present by set issued.

The format you use is up to you.

In future blogs, I hope to return to this subject and illustrate some of the material that I have in my collection. How I write things up is essentially my benefit. For single country collections, I just pencil in the title of the issue and maybe the date. Other parts of my collection tend to be a header and maybe a pencilled comment. Maybe, this exercise will be an excuse to get me to get stuck in to my collection and write it up. Don’t just follow my lead, take what you think is reasonable but put your own “stamp” on what you produce.

Kennsington High Street Crown Office, London W8.

Originally this office was sited at 257 Kennsington High Street but is now at 208-212 which is just about opposite the old office. The old office only had one kiosk present and items produced by this office had the office ident 011006. The current office has two kiosks. The office ident is now 012006.

I visited the office at 208-212 on the 10th July 2010 and the items obtained from both kiosks.

Kiosk 1 receipts had no address while kiosk 2 had the address in upper case lettering and the building number on a separate line. Kiosk 1 was vending sheep stamps while kiosk 2 was vending pigs. Session numbers for both kiosks on the 10 July 2012 may be obtained from the images above.

208-212 Kennsington High Street - present location.

257 Kennsington High Street - old location.

I visited the old office in July 2010 and the extract from the summary table from my pmechuk website is given below.

011006

W8 6DB

257 Kensington High Street, London, W8 6DB

27/11/09

The kiosk was at session 11693 on 16/7/10. No logo was printed on receipts.

1

I hope to add further entries giving details of items obtained from various Wincor-Nixdorf offices. In this way, I hope the evidence that I am producing will assist collectors of this material. I would welcome feedback and data on session numbers, stamps vended, errors and varieties, problems, etc at any and all offices throughout the UK. Either add a comment to this site or e-mail me at pmechuk@gmail.com.

Barcodes For Importance

Stardate: 110912
I am still receiving mail for former occupants. Mostly, this is annoying because the sender has ignored the fact that correspondence has been returned to sender for so long. Sometimes the odd item of interest does drop through the letter box. One such item arrived from Vanquis Bank apparently based in Bradford (BD1  2SU) but with a response address in Chatham (ME4 4WW) and a return address in Harlow (CM20 9AL). It contained a credit card application form.

On the front was printed a fake tracking label with barcode and a grid similar to old fashioned computer paper tape. On the back was a four state bar code (illustrated above) with 101 bars. I have added a ruler to the image to give an indication of scale. It is printed in ordinary ink. Whether it has any purpose other than to make the item appear to be more important than it is, is uncertain. If you have any information on this 101 bar barcode, I would welcome it. Have you seen a similar item with the same barcode? What was the postcode used? Similarly, items with a different on the reverse with the postcode.

Leave either as a comment or email pmechuk@gmail.com.

Autumn Stampex 2012

The norphil.blogspot site has images of the Cattle and Flag faststamps to be used at Autumn Stampex. Of note is the data string on the two strips.

Cattle:
A9NL12  C2-051840-06

Flag:
A9GB12 A1-000001-01

The string from the Cattle suggests that these are from a batch prepared for use in the presentation packs since hare prepared with the same string 051840 which corresponds to May 1840 . Transaction number 06 was the first day of issue of the Penny Black.

The flag string suggests normal usage on a kiosk.

Of note is the office id which includes letters replacing the numerical sequence. As a guess, I think that the NL in the cattle string may stand for Holland (Netherlands) and the GB in the flag issue for Britain. The 12 is obviously the year of issue (2012). The A9 may susggest one of two possibilities - a model code or just the first use in September.

C2 and A1 are kiosk identifiers.

If you have any further info on these, email pmechuk@gmail.com

Autumn Stampex 2012

Stamp Magazine reports that two new Hytec kiosks will be at this show (26-29 September 2012). These kiosks will have additional features to those that previously appeared.

Initially, the kiosks will be vending the pig faststamps and a special edition of the flag faststamp with a jubilee overprint. When the new cattle faststamps appear, they will replace the pigs.

More as a when it becomes available.

Hytec Kiosk as used at the Spring Stampex 2012