Latest PRC Philatelic News

Updated: January 10, 2012

 

We have just received a list of the latest Scott numbers for a few 2010 and most 2011 PRC new issues. It appears Scott has dropped the "sheetlet" designation and are now calling these souvenir sheets. A big surprise was assigning number #3809b to the silk version of the sheetlet for #3806-9 and ignoring the sheetlet on normal paper. We are scrambling to secure a supply of the silk version and will add a page for it to the 2011 album pages.

There is another end of the year souvenir sheet which the agency in Beijing has added to their 2011 year set folders. Space for this will be provided in our 2011 pages, but we do not expect to get supplies for this sheet until much later in the year. As long as the year set folders sell well in China there is no incentive for dealers there to remove the souvenir sheets for separate sale.

The 2011 PRC year set is now available. We will begin working on the new 2011 supplement for our PRC specialty album as soon as we have all the necessary stamps. Publication will again be in March.

The recently issued souvenir sheet (#3977) was also issued imperforate in a very limited quantity. We have a few of these on the unified supplement list (back of this letter) and should be able to special order more once those are gone. No space for this variety is planned for the 2011 supplement though a custom album page will be available for those who wish to add it to their album.

We continue to actively buy some of the more scarce PRC sets which we occasionally find here and there underpriced enough to allow resale. These are added to the supplement price lists as they become available. Day by day it is getting harder to find anything underpriced which we need.

Reminders

In order to make our website even more useful, we added the current retail prices for items which are out of stock earlier this year. These prices appear in red italics and are for the convenience of our customers and friends so they can keep up with volatile PRC market. Please do not order any items with prices in red italics! We plan to keep the list updated every time something changes. Please note that apparently some browsers are not displaying the red color of these out of stock prices but the italics are showing up so be careful if not using Internet Explorer.

A new price list for mint unified odds and ends was recently added to this web-site.

The 2010 supplement for our PRC specialty album is available for shipment. The supplement is 32 pages at a cost of $17.75 each. We have also changed slightly our Terms of Sale for supplements. For this or any other supplement please now add $3.25 for shipping plus $1.75 if the order is under $50.

We have completed the tedious process of adding the Michel catalogue numbers to our online unified price list through 2009. This should make it easier for our European customers to find exactly what they are looking for. The complete list through 2010 is available via snail mail (see free publications for details). We also filled in the various missing Showgard mount sizes for which we have data on the regular unified and supplement unified lists.

Last year we discovered a newly published CD catalogue for Manchurian Local Overprinted issues. It has the stamp pictures in color, and they are listed alphabetically by region. The stamps are listed according to the Kerr Catalogue. This should be a great supplement to the Kerr catalogue aiding in stamp identification, and a must for all MLO collectors. Details on the MLO price list.

The #3769-72 sheetlet is a bit too big to fit on one of our album pages.  It is still a valid 2009 issue - just no place to mount it.

As of January 1, 2010, all international insured mail needs to have a full customs declaration attached to the outside of the envelope. The only way to avoid customs is to pay for the order with cash or a postal money order and have it shipped via uninsured airmail. The reason given for the change is to make sure nobody here in the USA is aiding international terrorism via the postal system.

In 2009 there was a run on the SARS stamp (#3275) and our only stock left is in complete sheets which are very scarce. We have removed the singles from our price lists and list only the complete sheet of 12 stamps which the collectors in China desire the most for this issue. You may be able to find a needed single on our supplement list or from one of our competitors.

When sending us a fax make sure your fax machine is set to imprint your fax number on the fax sent. Our machine is set to ignore faxes without the number because of the plethora of junk faxes coming through lately.

We still have four of the scarce Yang listed PRC money order stamps and still can't find a good place to put them on our online price lists, so, for the time being , they will remain here. We have MO6 at $20, MO7 at $20, MO11 at $10, and MO14 at $40.

A new diversion for Cliff - z scale model trains (see home page for link).

 

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