Germany - Booklet Panes

Thank you as always NL .

Hmmm translating from German to English is let alone another problem .

I'll just print out a mini copy of the full page you provided and pack it with the booklet .

Nelson has it correct up to identifying the booklet as Michel booklet number 3 b.  However, it can't be 3 b 2 - the "A" type is for panes that are perforated around the entire selvedge ("Rand allseitig durchgezähnt") and the "B" type is for panes which have no perforation along the top edge ("Rand oben nicht durchgezähnt").  Here's an example nabbed from an eBay listing which shows a "B" pane that has no perforations along the top edge.  Booklet 3 b 2 contains panes 7 B, 8 B X and 9 B, all of which have no perforations along the top edge since they're "B" type panes.  Similarly, you can rule out booklet 3 b 4, which contains panes 7 A (perfs all around) and 8 B X & 9 B (no perfs along the top).  All your panes are type "A".



So, your choices are 3 b 1 or 3 b 3.  The difference is in the middle pane with the six 10 pf green stamps.  Booklet 3 b 1 contains pane 8 A X (six copies of stamp 704 A X) and Booklet 3 b 3 contains pane 8 A Y (six copies of stamp 704 A Y).  So, you have to go back into the listing for stamps to see the difference between 704 A X and 704 A Y.  It turns out that the "X" type stamps are on chalk-surfaced or coated paper ("gestrichenes Papier") and the "Y" type stamps are on normal paper ("normales Papier").  There are plenty of examples in stamp literature which say you're supposed to get a piece of silver wire and rub it on the surface of the paper, and if it leaves a mark then you know you have a coated paper.  This has the obvious drawback of leaving a grey mark on your stamp - all you're doing is using the stamp like sandpaper on the silver wire, since the chalk coating is harder than the silver.  Others say you're supposed to rub the stamp surface over your bottom lip and it will feel cool or some such thing.  I use my digital microscope to look at the paper surface and printing quality.  A coated stamp was coated for the purposes of stopping fraudsters from removing the cancellations and using the stamp again, but it had a secondary benefit of improving print quality by smoothing out the roughness inherent in normal paper with all its fibres and so on.  Sometimes you can see the individual fibres in normal paper.  Sometimes you can see tiny pits that look like air bubbles in imperfectly coated paper.  Sometimes you can see that the less-porous surface of coated paper has caused the printing ink to look like it's made a kind of a lake of ink on the surface, whereas it absorbs into normal paper.

And sometimes you can use common sense and say, "hmmm, a coated paper pane means I have a booklet worth €16 and a plain paper pane means I have a booklet worth €8500".  I bet you have coated paper!  It should be noted that the pane of 5 pf stamps in your booklet (pane 7 A) and the pane of five 20 pf stamps + one 10 pf stamp (pane 9 A) are guaranteed to be printed on coated paper.  So, you can have a close look at the 10 pf stamps on the two different panes and see if you can spot any difference in paper quality - if the papers are in fact different, you have a real valuable rarity.

I might as well add here a link to the Austrian Philatelic Society's fine German-English philatelic dictionary, for those with Michel catalogues who are trying to nail down exact translations of the terms they see.

Also, hooray for Jolanthe the pig - I hope she got her table scraps!

Ryan