My First Experience With Machins

Here are a few that caught my eye during the initial sorting:


One with a bit of selvage and what I think would be called a guide arrow?


Sheffield 5
Northeast P.D.O.



Make any West Yorkshire post office your next stop for Saverstrips.



And similarly:


Make any post office in Cleveland your first stop for an Easy Rider bus ticket.

And a question – what are those little blueish marks under the words “rider” and “bus”? I encountered many pieces with similar marks and wonder about them. Are they guides for the cancellation machines?  Are they printed on the postcards/envelopes?

An extreme rarity! OK, not really, but it's quite uncommon to see used British stamps with selvage attached.  When I was a younger collector, I almost never saw British stamps with attached selvedge and I wondered if maybe British stamps were like Swedish stamps, seldom found in sheet format.  Then when I was 18 years old I was in England and I went to a post office to mail some postcards home.  The front counter was littered with selvedge all over the place - for whatever reason, people generally tear it off before affixing the stamp.


They're put there during the sorting process.  They're phosphorescent, same as the type of tagging used on British stamps.  For whatever reason, Britain puts these sorting marks high up on the envelope and they often hit the stamps - they now use fluorescent vertical bars instead of those little phosphor dots, but they still put them way up high on the envelope.  I've never decided whether to consider those damaged or not - in general, as long as it still has the ink cancel I'm not too upset, but they go to the back of the line as far as desirability is concerned.  Canada, US, Australia, we use rows of sorting bars at the bottom of the envelope so they don't generally hit the stamp (unless the envelope goes through the machine upside down).

Ryan

edit - ha ha, Rodney regurgitates my old stuff at record speed.

As previously mentioned, here are pictures from the preliminary sort.

The majority are 17p:



Followed by 16p and 13p:



12½p, 12p, 15p (and a few 14p and 11½p... and wayward 16p):



Finally, several other miscellaneous denominations:

Hmmm, 5 years since the last post. I am now in the same boat.

renden will have to wait much longer before I send him my spares. I don’t know all the varieties, of which there are many! Sorry, René!

A few pictures of some of the stockbooks of Machins on a shelf.

These are early issues of the halfpenny and penny


Some mixed blocks and strips that can be found (have some spares somewhere)


Some of the later issues with holograms

I know how you are feeling. I have a few purchases that seem to be held up because of the strike actions. Hoping it gets resolved soon. 
At least I have been able to get mounts cut for my Machins. Page printing is about to start. I have decided to keep a very «  basic » collection. I do not have patience to deal with the details of colour, paper, gum varieties. I know I would be banging my head to often on the stamp desk in frustration.

david

Having had 10kg of GB (off paper) to go through after purchasing about 20,000 Wildings the week before I am still slightly frayed around the edges several years later.

When I had that initial splurge I did check for details such as size and placement of the value but these days I don't bother with that level of detail if I cannot see it with the naked eye.

Dave, they are in an envelope waiting for me to finish the demolition of my kitchen and get to the PO