Thursday, January 19, 2012

Year of Chemistry stamp plate variety

It was brought to my attention today that the 6.10 NIS Chemistry stamp from January 2011 has a plate variety. It is in the tab and not the stamp itself. If you look at the blue block with the C in it, you can see that the year 2011 is printed there. On some of the stamps, the top part of the blue wasn't printed completely, so the year is missing. This is a constant plate variety, and I am not sure how many of the tabs have it, but it is at least 1 on every sheet. Take a look at your stamps and see which variety you have.

While we are talking about plate varieties, the 5.90 NIS New Years stamp also has one. On the bottom row of stamps, the Arabic is different than it is on the other rows of stamps. It appears to be partially cut. All of the tab stamps have the incorrect Arabic, while all the other stamps have it correct. Luckily, I collect both tabs and plate blocks, so I have both varieties covered.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My sheet has the variety on four of the five tabs. The left corner tab is the only regular one.

Graeme

Mike said...

I also have the left corner tab on my sheet as the only one that is like the 4.20 NIS stamp, with full sized box and 2011 inside it.

While we're at it, has anyone else noticed that the plate numbers shown on the new Valley Railway sheet differ from the sequence (and what was stated in the IPS bulletin #885? It states that the plate number is 849, but in actuality it is 846 (which was previously used on the Childrens Games Hopscotch sheet). Guess someone in the design department is dyslexic!

To my knowledge, this (seemingly unintended reuse of a plate number for a different issue) only happened once before since the numbering of plates was restarted back in 1986.

Mike Mehr
Mountain View, CA, USA

Mark Goldsmith said...

As of March 2012, both sheets are still available for purchase from the Israel Post Company on its website.