There were no starting new discoveries of modern stamps at Sunday's meeting of the Modern British Philatelic Circle, but a couple of members had some interesting Prestige Stamp Book errors to show. My thanks to Vince P for using his iPad to produce much better images than I could have done with my phone!
From 1986, the Steel Wheel British Rail booklet.
I'm sure this has been reported before, but it's nice to see, and thanks to Les G for bringing it along. Unfortunately not affecting the stamps, but a striking absence of the yellow on the captions and, less obviously, on the picture of mail sorting:
The Scots Connection 1989
This is a significant error which I don't recall seeing reported before, and Richard M is a lucky man to have found it. At first sight one might think that the pages have been inverted:
Here's the back cover, with the normal for comparison.
So in fact, only the front cover was differently aligned. This provides us with an explanation of how this could happen. Remembering that each page was printed in a sheet of something like 12 or 16, assembly would require all the original sheets, from back cover to front cover, to be stacked prior to stitching.
Stitching down the left edges of the front cover would probably then take place in the sheet, before the sheets were guillotined into individual books, and the binding material stuck over the stitching.
The obvious explanation for the error is that when the stack was knocked up and prepared for stitching, the
front cover was damaged - or pre-existing damage or misprinting was noticed. A new front cover sheet was drawn from the reserve pile, and placed on the stack
in the wrong orientation!
The stack then entered the stitching process, and the stitching duly applied down the
left edges of the front cover. The stack was then guillotined and bound, and the individual books packed in 10s. That would have dispersed the errors through several different shrink-wrapped packs. From the top, and to the casual observer, the unopened books would have appeared to be correct.
So where are the remainder of the errors ?
.jpg)
