Thursday, December 20, 2007

S21 - World Space Week First Day and S6.1 Auction

Jim received confirmation from UNPA New York (who checked with UNPA Vienna!) that the first day of issue of S21 is 4 October 2007. UNPA has offered to replace his personalized sheets when they return from the holidays. I'm not quite sure how they intend to do this, since we heard all the sheets have been sold and sent out.

A new January 9-10, 2008, Cherrystone Auction features one of the rarest personalized United Nations stamp sheets, S6.1, which has the two 37¢ stamp errors and Vereinte Nationene error in the selvage. The estimate for lot #1347 is $3,500. This seems high to me, but I don't know how many collectors there are of United Nations stamp errors. The sheet is listed, but unpriced, in Scott as 884b. There are certainly plenty of UN stamp errors to choose from, but perhaps because of its unique status, the sheet may attain a high realization. I will report on that after the auction. The auction link can be found here: http://www.stampcircuit.com/Search/. Search on "United Nations" or the lot number. If you search on United Nations, be sure to also select "All the Words."

The Scott numbering for the United Nations personalized stamps is inconsistent at best. Normally, they list the stamps individually. For example: 880-884. A strip of the five different stamps is listed as the last stamp, but with a letter suffix. In this example, the strip of five is 884a for the stamps in the normal sheet. There are no listings for the sheets currently. However, for this sheet only, the sheet is listed as 884b, not for the strip of five. We already know that at least one sheet was broken up into two strips of 5, so this strip with the four normal stamps 880-883 plus the 37 cent 884 should be 884b, not the sheet. This is the only sheet that actually has a Scott number. And, this is one of the reasons we decided to renumber the sheets the way we have; inconsistency within the Scott numbering system.

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