🇬🇬 Guernsey Post will issue 6 stamps on 29 May 2019 to commemorate the Bicentenary of the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the Prince Consort. It's a rather grim set of stamps lacking any colour depicting, as they do, photographs of the royal couple or sculptures of them. Rating;- **.
🇬🇧 Meanwhile two of the designs of Royal Mail's upcoming set of stamps to commemorate the Bicentenary of the Birth of Queen Victoria are known now to collectors. The stamps, due 24 May 2019, are a 1st Class rate which depicts an elderly queen and is shown on a cover producer's internet site while a portrait of the younger queen was depicted on a £1.25p stamp the design of which was included in Royal,Mail publicity released at the end of December 2018. It looks like being an excellent set of great relevance to stamp collectors given that the Queen was the person who was depicted on the very first postage stamps.
🇯🇪 Jersey Post will issue another one of its tiresome 'Commemorative sheets' on 28 April 2019 to mark the 60th anniversary of Jersey Zoo operated by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. The sheet contains 20 x UK letter rate 'Jersey Flag' stamps with attractive attached labels and costs £17. It's difficult to work up any enthusiasm for these sheets - they are ridiculously expensive and, due to their size, difficult to house. I do wish Jersey Post would give up producing the things. Rating:- 0.
🇲🇾 Pos Malaysia issued a set of 3 stamps and 1 miniature sheet on 9 April 2019 on the subject of Bees. The stamps are hexagonal in shape and quite colourful. Rating:- ***.
in 1402 you let us know about some overprints that appeared on the Tanzania bureau's web site that were older issues posing as 2019 issues. I went to their site hoping to place an order. When I tried to create an account their software just took me to the home page. When I filled the shopping cart and tried to check out, my browser warned me their site was not secure. I found a comment page where a number of other people expressed problems too. I left frustrated without spending any money.
ReplyDeleteHello eyeonwall,
ReplyDeletemy experience as reader of some postal website of Africa along the years is that the UPU seems helping African posts to modernise their infrastructures and capacity to adapt to competition (renting postboxes, delivering parcels, mobile phone subscription, moving things - Ivory Coast Post Office just launches an activity of moving house).
I conclude this by following the UPU Twitter accounts and by the similarities of these postal operators' websites: the "Philately" pages often bear a generic text on stamp collecting without any links to stamp issues pages.
I am not surprised that the Tanzania Bureau's website isn't up to date on web client's safety. I tried once to see how https://www.africaphilatelyshop.post worked (in 2016, it may have improved since). Despite being managed by Morocco Post, many pages were a fright for a Western customer used to pages of reminders of trade laws, etc.
For the sake of these postal operators, I hope they managed this modernising task.
Hello eyeonwall, The Tanzania Bureau website is quite useful for keeping up with what new stamps (or old stamps rediscovered in their stock such as the overprints you mention) have been released. I recall that I did successfully buy some stamps from the site 3 or 4 years ago but I haven't found it usable since then. I recently added the overprints to a shopping trolley but did not proceed as I realised I already had them in my collection. I received an e Mail a couple of days later inviting me to complete my order but I did not attempt to do so. I was going to order the 2018 issues from the site but like you found that the site would not allow me to complete the order and eventually I obtained them from a dealer.
ReplyDeleteAs Sébastien points out in his comment many of these African Post Office websites do not seem to be able to actually take an order. Three years ago I very successfully ordered new issues from the Uganda Post Office website and rapidly received them though they were despatched from USA. Kenya also keeps its new issues reasonably up to date on a philatelic site but I have not yet attempted to order from it. In the past I have successfully placed orders on the Namibia philatelic website.
On the whole it's really very difficult with so many territories and it makes me appreciate more the rôle of professional new issue dealers. It also makes me appreciate the tremendous role of The Crown Agents up to around the millennium and how easy it was to obtain many countries' stamps from them. Still, I suppose the challenge of discovering and tracking down some modern new issues adds an element of excitement to new issue collecting.