Where did this come from?

I was going through a stack of items to put away (finally!) and found some booklets. The one on the right is the normal one. The one on the left? The sleeves are brown instead of purple (I have another booklet where the sleeves appear to be blue, but it could just be a darker purple). Originally, I thought this was the only difference. Then, I opened up the booklet to look at the stamps. Both booklets have 10 With Love stamps. But,t eh top one has 2 extra blank stamps. You can just make out half of a plate number on the bottom "extra" stamp. I looked in my Bale catalog, but no mention is made of this difference. This is also one of the few Israel booklets that was not sold as a separate Tete-Beche sheet, so I have no idea what the sheet configuration was, but this is a new variety for me. Hopefully, it is unique and worth a small fortune, but somehow I doubt it. Any ideas? I can't even recall where I got these from at this point.

Another item to drop from the list!

This my stamp thing is getting ridiculous. Today,

I got an offer from a stamp dealer offering this sheet for $100. Apparently, only 2000 or so were made. That is in additon to this set of sheets, a different My stamp sheet with a 9-11 rememberence theme. Last month, it was this set of sheets wishing good luck to some soccer team. There are jsut too many sheets being printed, and they are all being offered at huge markups. For a mint sheet they are being offered at $25 and up per sheet, with FDC's starting at twice teh mint price! Time to back off and just collect the basic sheet with the generic picture they come with from now on, I guess.

What?

I was looking at E-bay today, and noticed something new. You can see here what is being marketed as a Souvenir Leaf. Now, Israel does put out souvenir leaves for collectors, although to me they are of dubious value, at least they are done by the Israel post, and have some degree of collectibility (though, I don't believe anywhere close to what the editors of the Carmel catalog would have you believe!) Anyway, these at first glance appear to be souvenir leaves, and the title of the auction is "ISRAEL SPECIAL SOUVENIR LEAF X 3diff BANK ISRAEL 50YEAR", but these are clearly not souvenir leaves. Real souvenir leaves look like this one. Notice the Israel Post logo? Also, notice at the top, it says "Souvenir Leaf", not "First Day Leaf". To me, it looks like someone is trying to make it appear that these are official philatelic items, while in reality, they are just a private FDC with a different cachet. Not that there is anything wrong with that. There might be a market for Israel FDC's with private cachet's, but I think these First Day Leaf's are int eh same category as the private booklets. They are philatelic creations by a dealer, and are not a must have if you are trying for a complete collection.

Not in my album

Here is the latest special souvenir sheet from Israel. This one was only available at the Jerusalem stamp show in May. It came as part of the show program. The major differences between this one, and the normal version of this souvenir sheet is that this one is imperf and has a serial number printed on it. Are we going to get one of these each year now? I am just speculating that this won't be in my album, since the pages for 08 won't be out until August of 2009, but based on prior history, I don't think this will be included in the White Ace album.