I had thought that I had written my last post about Machin discoveries and, indeed, it may well be that someone has seen and reported this before, maybe nearly 25 years ago!
Regular contributor MM sent me this image of a clipping from an envelope purchased from Norway. Eagle-eyed readers will see that there are no values on the stamps, and that the 'postmark', dated 24 November 2002, isn't.
In fact the whole thing is printed - 'stamps', postmark, even the shadows aside the stamps. The image of the Christmas stamp is of the 1981 18p set designed by Lucinda Blackmore (then aged 6), whilst the Machin image may be imitating the £1 value from April 1997.
I asked the Norwegian Seamen's Mission in London whether they could tell me any more (with no response received as yet), but further investigation shows that while the item of mail may have originated with them, it was actually processed IN Norway.
B-BLAD, at the right of the Christmas stamp is a marking for the Norwegian postal service, Posten Norge for a specific, lower-priority bulk mail service for periodicals and membership magazines.
So it appears that it was from a Christmas newsletter/magazine produced in the UK but posted to Norwegian addresses using the Norwegian domestic postal system.
Royal Mail did not introduce stamp images printed onto Direct Mail envelopes until 2015 but there had been examples of stamps used on publicity material before then.
It seems unlikely that the Seaman's Mission obtained permission from Royal Mail to use the copyrighted Machin image as their rules say that stamps must be used unaltered, apart from overlapping of different images.
Another one, closer to home
Although I headed this 'closer to home' it originated almost as far away as it could, in Warrnambool a city in Victoria, Australia, used on the council's recycling flyer.
It's 'closer to home' because the person who sent me this picture was convinced that the image was taken from our website. OK, it could have been taken from any other, but the black border and placing of the coloured chevron against the perforations appears to be exactly the same.
If you have any other pre-2015 examples of stamps being used on marketing or other mail, please let me know.
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