791. Attack Of The Surcharges.

  In a comment at the end of Blog 790, Stewie1911 mentioned the difficulties in obtaining modern surcharged issues and notably the 2014 - 15 provisional issues of Papua New Guinea. I had previously mentioned that Steven Zirinsky had a number for sale on his website and that I had obtained three of them from the British dealer, Nigel Haworth. His newsletter had stated that there were a total of 35 new stamps in the issue. 

  I have now found an article which fully details these Papua New Guinea stamps ( i-enorg/background-information/papua-new-guinea-postage-stamps/ueberdrucke-2014-2015/) which has been published by Interssengemeinschaft Neuguinea, an international study group for collectors of the stamps of PNG. The article illustrates all 35 of the new stamps using scans supplied by Steven Zirinsky.

The issues are broken up into 4 groups - 

1. 2014 - 8 stamps - all K1.30 surcharges on previous K1.25 stamps thus providing stamps in the new postal rate by using up stamps with face values of the previous postal rate (see Blog 750).

2. 2015 - 11 stamps - previous commemoratives surcharged with high face values for use on heavier overseas mail :- 3 x K15, 3 x K25 (see Blog 788), 2 x K40 and 3 x K90.

3. 2015 - 6 stamps - new stamps in 5t denomination used to make up values of unsurcharged K1.25 stamps to K1.30 value. Printed in sheets of  50. 

4. 2015 - new stamps printed in sheets of 20 and 20 attached labels - 2 x 5t.

5. 2015 - new stamps without attached labels printed in sheets of 40 - 6 x 5t and 2 x 20t.

  These stamps are said to have not been distributed to philatelic dealers. Although I suppose that the surcharged stamps will be necessarily very difficult to find at an affordable price, I can not help but suspect that the new stamps must eventually turn up somewhere or the other.

  I strongly recommend visiting the I-NG site to see the various stamps that make up this important issue.

  Quite recently a seller on one of the Internet auction sites was offering 6 recent Fiji surcharges for sale. At the time I was distracted and thought no more about these stamps but now realise that 3 of them at least are new to me and presumably have been issued in early 2016. They are the 1c on 44c Purple Swamphen definitive, a 1c on 81c Kadavu fantail definitive and the 20c on 63c Goshawk stamp which I have not otherwise seen being offered for sale elsewhere but have mentioned in previous Blog 743. No doubt they will pop up again. Will this series of surcharges never end (it has been going on for 10 years now)?

  Nigel Haworth has been selling another interesting new item recently - the British Indian Ocean Territory miniature sheet released on 12 February 2016 on the subject of the BIOT Pelagic Expedition of 2012 and depicting 6 different sharks but with reversed watermark. In the normal sheet the tops of the multiple crowns point to the right of the sheet when viewed from the obverse but in the error they point to the left. Watermark errors are rare nowadays. Rating:- *****.

  On 21 July 2016 An Post, the Post office of Ireland increased its National and International Airmail postal rates and this has resulted in the need for definitives in the new postal rates, the result being a 72c Easter Rising self-adhesive from booklets of 10 (previous rate being 70c), a €1.10 Easter Rising self-adhesive stamp from booklets of 10 (previous rate being €1.05c) and 2 x 72c Easter Rising self-adhesive stamps from coils. Rating:- *****.

  I depicted the 6 stamps of Jersey Post's new First World War set in Blog 787 and I now depict below the accompanying £2 miniature sheet. The theme of the set is "Battles of the Great War" and the battle depicted on the miniature sheet is the Battle of Cambrai. The issue will be released on 4 August 2016. Rating:- *****.

  In Blog 418 (5 June 2014) I mentioned a $100 Parrot definitive stamp from Grenada which was on sale on an Internet auction site but since then nothing has really been heard about this item. I have not seen it being sold on the IGPC website and I can't recall any dealers offering it for sale. Currently, however, a number of the stamps are being sold by another Internet auction site dealer - in Russia - so it seems as though this particular stamp is out there if you look for it. I wonder why it has not been offered for sale by some of the big western dealers.

Post scriptum:- the helpful comment by Birdstamper below tells me that the parrot stamp has indeed appeared on the IGPC website - I have certainly overlooked it up to now and had wondered if the stamp had actually been issued. Clearly, as I wrote above, it's out there.