Unitrade Announcement

Political speak for sure and I have no idea where that comes from. Unitrade for me is the go to catalogue for Canada and Provinces stamps. They use Scott numbering but with many varieties added in. 

There is where the premier stamp organization steps in to purchase the brand.

Unitrade's somewhat confusing statement is neither "political speak" or "overt politics". It's about stamps -- and, in fact, it rejects using politics to determine which stamps to include in a catalogue. Don't read into it the opposite of what it means. The confusion is partly due to the very confusing wording of the statement, including Unitrade's unfortunate claim that omitting junk stamps from catalogues like Scott was "politics" which it wasn't. Scott believed it was leaving out stamps that actually weren't real stamps. That's judgement, not poltics. But maybe it's a sign of the times that people read "politics" into everything, even stamp collecting! I'm as tired of this as you probably are. 

As angore said, Unitrade seems to be referring to the now very old (and no longer used for some decades) policy which Scott Publishing once briefly adopted in which they declined to list stamps of countries which were flooding the market with enormous numbers of so-called junk stamps that clearly did not meet any postal need. These stamps were intended almost exclusively to be sold to collectors, we being the "suckers" who would buy them. Most were about topics unrelated to the country that issued them -- pop stars, Disney, endless series of topicals. Every country does that once in awhile, but these stamps were nearly always about non-local topics and there were hundreds of them, most of which did not real postal use. Mongolia's repeated issuing of souvenir sheets honoring the Grateful Dead comes to mind. It really did get very very silly. Unless Mongolians really liked the Grateful Dead. 

Even stranger, these stamps often weren't even available at post offices in that country. And even more amazingly, sometimes the stamps never even went to that country, being sold exclusively by stamp "agencies" elsewhere from which dealers and collectors could buy them. Think about that. Stamps issued by a country which never even were in that country. Were those really "postage stamps"?

The issues of some of these countries were once derisively referred to as "sand dunes"(!), but they included a lot more than Dubai and Sharjah and Amman. They also came from Togo and other African countries as well as some in Asia and the West Indies like the barely inhabited Grenadines islands which belong to Grenada whose stamps you'd think they would use. And perhaps elsewhere (including sometimes the U.S.!). And they still do. Flip through the Scott catalogues and you'll see massive listings of them.

To try to discourages such issues, Scott at one point adopted their "black blot" program to figuratively mark unnecessary stamps intended only for collectors. It didn't work to stop these issues. Now Scott lists them, giving therm catalogue numbers, though often literally as "lists" without images.

So I suppose what Unitrade was trying to say is that they won't omit any stamps a country issues. But neither does Scott now, either. And they haven't done this for decades -- so I'm not at all sure what Unitrade's point is.

But no politics is involved in the statement. In fact, what Unitrade say was just the opposite of politics. As I read it, they were saying that in their catalogue, they would NOT involve politics about which stamp issues were legitimate -- which isn't actually "politics." It's more judgement about what a stamp is. Catalogue publishers are not making "political" decisions, they are trying to decide which are legitimate postage stamps and which aren't. It's a fruitless business, though. I personally have no problem if Scott leaves outs the stamps from barely inhabited islands like Grenada's Grenadines or countries where the stamps never were used, but other collectors may love these "stamps," and I'm fine with that even if I think it's silly. Lots of people do things I think are really silly. I saw a video once where a fan at a baseball game was wearing his ball cap backwards -- while shading his eyes from the sun with his hand. Give that some thought. 

Anyway, I hope Unitrade gets bought by someone who will continue to issue their catalogues. But if not, maybe Scott (now Amos Media) will issue their own separate Canada catalogue. This may be a great opportunity for them to do that. After all, Unitrade used Scott catalogue numbers, so unlike when the Minkus catalogues died off, there would be no problem with renumbering. Hopefully, one of these two things will happen. I'm a casual Canada collector, so I mostly rely on Scott, myself, but I do keep an older copy of Unitrade.