The 50p stamp is Norvic 3051.7 and the Special Delivery 100g stamp is Norvic 2985.7a. and these are in our webshop now on these links.
It would be helpful and speed customer orders if those who have asked us to hold these and others for us would order them through the shop and pay for them in their usual way. together with any older stamps. [If the order cannot be completed, please order what you can, choose 'pay by cheque', and then we will add anything reserved and bill you for the total of your order for payment by any of the usual methods.] - Thank you!
The new stamps:
The first batch of 2018 printings will be issued on 20 March 2018 - that's assuming there won't be any discoveries between now and then!
The RAF Centenary retail booklet contains 4 new 1st class Machins in the darker red colour, coded M18L MCIL. These are printed in gravure by Walsall.
New tariff definitives.
Information received from sources outside Royal Mail (who won't reveal anything!) are that the following stamps are part of the new tariff range:
£1.25 Holly Green - printing date 10/01/18
£1.45 Dove Grey - printing date 10/01/18
£1.55 Marine Turquoise - printing date 15/01/18
£2.65 Purple Heather - printing date 15/01/18
The above are all printed by Walsall's branch of ISP, and from those dates two values may be on the same primary cylinder. Colour cylinder number is W1 - the iridescent and phosphor cylinders should also be W1. As we have seen in comments on the tariff change post, ISP are also printing the £2.25. I presume for the time being that these are printed in gravure, being long-run definitives but we won't know for sure until Royal Mail tell us.
The first supplies of £2.25 distributed to branches are from De La Rue stock from the only M16L printing, 21/11/16.
The England country definitives were printed on 27/12/17 in litho by Cartor, in 4-colour process, with plate numbers C1 x4.
Pictures of all the actual tariff change stamps when we get them. This is taken from the March Philatelic Bulletin which arrived on 23 February.
Machin Forgeries
As we have posted before, there have been a great number of different forgeries of Machin stamps. The first was the 24p brown, which was very, very, crude. But it seems that production of self-adhesive stamps and labels is much easier in the 21st century. There were some fairly crude copies of the early gold 1st class stamps, including the PIP version.
Royal Mail introduced security features in 2009, partly to prevent forgery, and partly to prevent reuse of uncancelled stamps. But it didn't, as we have noted. The early gold, then the Diamond Jubilee, and Long to Reign stamps, and finally the forgers produced the red (both versions) including some with the security backing paper!
We've put a selection of these on our webshop. Some are better than others and some are more plentiful than others: some we have only 1 of.
All used examples are pictured individually, so customers can choose which one to buy. Not all are postmarked, but all have been through the post. We don't have any 2nd class, or 1st class Large - although we know these exist. We still have some stock of the £1 brown MTIL.
The first packs of booklets have started to appear with 2018 dates on them. I found two packs of 6x1st Padlock cover books in a local supermarket with 08/01/18 date on the outside. Shame the books were M17L inside the packs.
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