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Monday, 6 April 2009

Short phosphor bands on Faststamps

Several people have reported that the labels we know as Faststamps (but which Royal Mail refers to as 'Post and Go stamps') exist with misplaced phosphor - inset right, short top or bottom.

As you may know, the Philatelic Bureau (aka Tallents House) now sells sets of 5 labels in a specially designed carrier - not quite a presentation pack, but similar, along with badly creased cellophane sleeves. These are not dispensed from Post & Go machines, which produce labels with thermal print values etc, but are specially printed by Walsall in gravure.


It seems that short bands on these are more common than on the machine dispensed labels. Here are the findings from some of our batches:

1. Inland (2) and Europe very short at foot; worldwide slightly short at top.
2. World 10gr slightly short at top, World 20gr slightly short at foot; remainder OK.
3. Inland (2) very short at foot; World slightly short at top; Europe OK.

Remember, these are each sets of 5 dispensed from the same pack, so the packs are assembled from various parts of the print run.

I still have more to check, but I have 3 type 1, 4 type 2, and 1 type 3 packs. Not scarce at all, it would seem!
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous7 April 2009 at 17:47

    You do not state if these short bars are below the perforations. As these stamps (labels) have no borders it could be that they are actually misperforated, as with some reports of normal sheet stamps.

    I am not an expert on this subect, and do not know how the leading experts will catagorise them. Saying this I guess Leading philatelists and the MBPC will no doubt take measurments to determine if they are genuine inset and short bars.

    Roy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9 April 2009 at 12:08

    My pack that I received today has short top bars on the Worldwide 10 and 20 g clearing the perfs by just over 1mm

    Terry

    ReplyDelete
  3. Machin Man9 April 2009 at 15:04

    thanks Terry can you send us picture of one?

    ReplyDelete

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