Tuesday, October 19, 2010

White Ace pages...missing stamps?

I finally received my White Ace pages in late August, and put them in my album a few weeks ago. I found some curious design issues with the pages. I sent a mail to Washington Press asking for feedback on the issues I found, but have yet to receive a response. So, I decided to post here to see what others thought of the issues. There are two cases where half of a booklet is needed. I am not sure why they choose half a booklet, it would have been much easier from my perspective to just include the whole booklet. I guess they made this choice to save collectors from having to purchase the whole booklet, but I have yet to see a dealer offering half booklets for sale, and you certainly can't get them from the philatelic service, so I don't see the point. If you have to buy the whole booklet, why not just display it intact? There are also 2 pages missing the decorative border. I am not sure if this is just my copy of the pages, or all of them, but pages 370 and 374 are borderless. The International Year of Astronomy issue is shown as a set of 3, but all with the same picture and value. I assume this is just a copy and paste error.

Now we get to the bigger issues I have with the pages. The set of Menorah definitives is shown as 3 stamps (30ag, 50ag, and 1NIS). The 40ag is not included, even though it was issued in September of 2009. The stamps are also shown out of order, with the 1 NIS being first, followed by the 30ag and then the 50ag. Normally, the high value is last, so that would put the 1NIS last. The last big issue is the Mejujaim stamps are not shown at all. This is a unique issue, one that I have spent a lot of time documenting here. At the very least, I would expect the 8 sheets available from the philatelic service would be shown. While the stamps are the same as various definitive issues from past years, the fact that they are without phosphor, with rouletted perforations, and self-adhesives make them very different from the earlier versions.