I hope everybody in the UK had a good long weekend, and elsewhere that you enjoyed the normal weekend! Now that the bank holiday weekend is over, we will be taking another week off. There are no pictures in this post, partly because I wanted to get it out now on Monday night and deciding which images to use and aligning them just takes time.
The office will be closed from this Friday until at least Saturday 8 June. It may be possible to answer emails and accept blog comments in this time, but no promises.
Invalid Machins and Regionals - last chance
More importantly, when we return I shall arrange to take my remaining stock of Machins, Regional Machins, and Country definitives (and associated products like booklets and presentation packs) to another local dealer.
When he has had his pick of anything he needs to replenish stocks, I shall prepare the rest to send to Royal Mail to exchange for what I suspect will be even more datamatrix Machins - not that the King Charles stamps are any better, I shall still need to get rid of them somehow.
So if you need anything at all to add to your collection that is in the current lists do please let me know as soon as possible. You don't have to pay for everything in one go if it is a big order. All you will be doing is stopping potential additions to your collections from going to the incinerator.
This is definitely your last chance!
Other GB collectables.
Keeping with the Machin/Country theme, over the years I have produced definitive first day covers, especially when Royal Mail did not. Some of these are from booklets, especially prestige booklets when you really only want one of each of the new stamps, not the whole pane.
Others are those which are not regarded as new by Royal Mail, such as the security definitives definitely first available at one of the London shows where Royal Mail had a presence (2010 Large letter booklets, for example).
Lastly there are Machins and country definitives by different printers for which even Stanley Gibbons Concise declines to show the differences although they have been well written up.
I have spares of a few of these so if enough people are interested I'll produce a list of what is left. None will be expensive, partly because the expensive stamps (like Special Delivery) were rarely first found in a way that we could be sure of an issue date. (See the back of the Security Checklist for examples of what was produced - we don't have all of these in stock of course.)
And I am still working on a list of aerogrammes, including some thematic subjects, and this will be done more quickly if you tell me are interested.
Other other GB collectables.
Do people still collect first day covers and have gaps to fill? If you do and would like some good quality unaddressed covers with special relevant postmarks, let me know. This only applies to Queen Elizabeth issues and mainly from 1998 onwards. We also have stocks of some of our own design FDCs which weren't promoted properly at the time for some reason (probably lack of time due to too many issues!), including some prestige book pane sets.
Special postmarks were once the thing that everybody had to have, and there was even a Postmark Club which could supply on a standing order basis. These can be very useful for thematic interest so if you have a thematic collection, and want to know what exists, do ask - sport, military, trains, ships, coats of arms, etc.
Other non-GB collectables.
I can't profess to have much in the way of South America or Asia, but I do have worldwide postal history, picture postcards, some stamps mint and used, etc.
If you collect particular countries or themes, or card subjects, let me know and I will try to find what we have. There might be a delay because while I do know that I have many things, I don't always know where they are. I've found a lot more whilst checking mixed random boxes for invalidated Machins etc, but when we moved four years ago(!) some part-full boxes were amalgamated for ease of stacking and moving, so there are things still to be found.
POLITICS - NOT HERE!
If you want to escape from pre-election turmoil, then I can promise you there will be nothing here about the UK's forthcoming general election (on 4 July for anybody who doesn't know) - unless there is some campaign literature or similar bearing interesting stamps or postal markings. Given that candidates' promotions are delivered free by the postman, that is highly unlikely!
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