On 27 March the 78p, 88p and £1.88 stamps sold at Post Offices were printed by WSP, the new Royal Mail Signed For stamps sold at Post Offices were printed by DLR. The stamps on Royal Mail standing order FDCs were all printed by DLR in sideways-fed coils. The stamps in RM presentation packs were all printed by DLR, but are supposed to have come from counter sheet printings - but they were guillotined, rather than rouletted. (See images of both types and more details here.)
During May examples of the 88p and £1.88p printed by De La Rue appeared in some Post Offices - without the ink-jet printing of the sheet number and printing date in the right-hand margin. The 78p pays the surface letter rate and no DLR examples were found in PO branches at this time.
We now have the DLR 78p with a printing date of 24/04/13, and the 88p with a printing date of 30/04/13.
Cylinder blocks and date blocks are available for both these, and cylinder blocks and date blocks are once again available for the £1.88 value which has not - as far as we know - appeared with a printing date. Buy the 78p here, or click on the images.
If the DLR versions on FDCs were from a coil (roll), shouldn't they have also had 'MRIL' security overprint?
ReplyDeleteNo, they were on a multi-value coil containing all the stamps; the coil was not available to direct mailers and was produced only for Royal Mail internal production purposes as has been the case since at least 2003.
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