Stop the presses

Well, at least stop cutting up the press sheets. Israel has joined the US (and maybe others) in offering uncut press sheets to collectors. I received an offer from the philatelic service to purchase an uncut press sheet of the Innovations sheets. The press sheet consists of 3 sheets of each of the 3 innovations sheets that were issued in honor of Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Each sheet is individually signed and numbered by the artist. It was limited to 999 sheets. The offer price was $82. I am not sure if that represents a premium over the price of 3 normal sets of the sheets, but if there is a premium, it appears relatively small. One important difference between the press sheet and the the normal sheets is that the press sheets are completely imperf. So, watch out for imperf stamps and sheets showing up as errors. Anyone that purchased a press sheet can create those easily. According to the announcement about this sheet, they will offer additional press sheets from time to time. They envision this as the first in a new collectors line of prestigious items in Israel. I hope they limit them to once a year at most, since they are not cheap, and I am unsure how to store it, as the format is not convenient to display. Any ideas?

Wow

I submitted an article on mejujaim stamps to the SIP journal over 6 months, and hadn't thought much about it since then. Until this week, when I received the latest journal, and saw a request for articles. So I sent the same article in again, and this time I got a response from the editor. Apparently, he thinks the stamps are a gimmick, and not worth a write up in the journal. Really? I guess he is entitled to his opinion, but since his target audience is those of us that collect Israel Philatelic items, I would assume he would want to be as inclusive as possible. His response completely floored me, and removed all my motivation to write further articles for the journal. Are all modern Israel topics gimmicky? This is what I collect. Finding information about modern items is next to impossible. Until now, I thought that was just because there are few collectors, but now I wonder if the editor of the journal actively disparaging the topic has something to due with the lack of information being disseminated? Maybe I am just not used to rejection. I would like to think that I would be more accepting if he said he didn't like my writing, or the focus was too narrow, or something similar, that I would accept that without this frustration, but I guess I will never know. Anyway, for the foreseeable future, I will just share my thoughts here, and keep my gimmicky collecting habits to the readers here.