Wednesday 9 September 2020

More fluorescent variations - now Business Sheets.

Regular readers will recall that the counter and business sheets printed by Walsall in 2018 had a wide variety of fluorescence and phosphoresence, but that after that printing seemed to settle down with fewer variants in 2019.

John G has recently sent these pictures of (Walsall-printed) 2nd Large Business Sheets from 2019.  As you can see there is a marked difference in the two printings.



John writes:
The fluorescence from stamps printed on 22 October 2019 (sheet 2960957) is very bright whereas the fluorescence from stamps on the sheet printed on 6 February 2019 (sheet 2783747) is dull. An image of the fluorescence elicited by long-wave UV illumination of two stamps photographed together is shown. (Note also the slightly short bands on the later printing.)
As I wrote in January last year, "these are much more difficult to find because they require the purchase of whole sheets (of 100 small stamps or 50 large letter): if the stamps turn out to be the same then that expenditure - by collector or dealer - is wasted as few people have an outlet for that many spare stamps."

If you are a specialist collector preferring mint then these could be costly or impossible to find.  On the other hand if you don't mind including used stamps in your collection, postally used examples should be easier to find in kiloware.  With the (non-soakable) self-adhesive stamps tending to be collected on paper, the UV reaction won't be affected by soaking.  Although white envelopes show the stamps better in a collection, manilla are better for testing a UV reaction, unless the white paper has no brightener.


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