NOTE: UNITRADE 2007 EDITION
In the Unitrade 2007 Edition, with the exception of a few minor cosmetic changes to layout, no factual changes, no new varieties and virtually no price changes have been made in the Early and Middle Elizabethan portions of the catalogue. Hence, whatever shortcomings I point out in the 2006 Edition in my comparison of the Unitrade (2006) and Darnell (2005) catalogues below, these shortcomings persist in this latest edition of Unitrade. As a result, for the Early and Middle Elizabethan era Canadian stamp collector the 2007 Unitrade catalogue is a virtual waste of money and the collector would be well advised to remain with the 2006 edition which saw significant changes in this era.
It will be interesting to see what NEW information is contained in the next Darnell catalogues in these areas!
Michael Milos.
Letter to the Editor: Part 1.
The recent publication of the Unitrade Specialized Catalogue of Canadian Stamps ( 2006 Edition) with new editor Robin Harris at the helm has resulted in a work which will be of much interest to all Canadian philatelists. In this, and in proposed subsequent communications, I would like to comment upon some of the new and beneficial aspects which have been incorporated into this latest incarnation of the Unitrade castalogue, as well as some of its continuing shortcomings.
Despite the addition of a noted philatelist as the new editor of this publication, it would appear that previous editorial policy is still in effect in regards to some areas of the new catalogue and that both the new editor at Unitrade as well as Lyse Rousseau, the editor of the Darnell Stamps of Canada Catalogue, still seem to be operating in their own separate worlds in some respects, and one gets the impression that neither one seems to read the other's product carefully - or if they do, persist in ignoring what the other is publishing! Hopefully, with a new editor at Unitrade there will be improvement in this area. More on this later.
Under its new editor, the
Unitrade catalogue
has added a number of refinements and additions such as new charts,
simpler and more concise plate block pricing, listings by year
as well as side year bars which make locating stamps much easier
and all of these will no doubt be welcome to users of this catalogue.
In addition to these helpful new features, the specialized field
of stamp tagging which the noted author Ken Rose has struggled
for years to bring into the mainstream of collecting has finally
been achieved in this catalogue, to a limited extent, by the inclusion
of all known missing tag errors into this 2006 edition. With this
listing of the untagged varieties and their accompanying high
prices, many collectors who were reluctant to accept the field
of flourescent paper varieties, which both the Centennials and
the Caricature and Landscape definitives entailed, may now be
persuaded to purchase an ultraviolet lamp and to expand their
philatelic interests into what I call the field of ultraviolet
stamp collecting, thus broadening the scope of the hobby.
However, in addition to the completely untagged varieties, only
a few other tagging anomalies such as the "glowing moon"
constant tag variety on Scott# 695, the "hook tag" variety
on 10 stamps after SC#781, as well as 3 "comet" tag
varieties are listed
In this area of ultraviolet collecting the newest catalogue finally
acknowledges that there are indeed three paper varieties on SC#
480 and four papers on SC# 713 as well as newly listing paper
varieties for other issues, which I propose to make reference
to in future.
In summary, despite the new and beneficial additions to this latest catalogue, it still exhibits, in my opinion, a number of shortcomings which are of interest to many collectors and which I feel are of sufficient importance to collectors and the hobby as a whole that I will refer to them in future installments of this "letter" to your publication, if you so permit, in the hope that the new editor will add them to his "wish list" for the next edition.
Yours truly,
Michael Milos
Continue to Letter #2.