Machin, almost 40 years !

I took the last two days without blog in order to explore the first centimeter of the massive Machin jungle, this definitive series used in the United Kingdom since June, 5th 1967.

Here is a (little) branch :


Issued January, 19th 1999, this non-value indicator stamp (NVI, permanently valid stamp in France postal words) helped you frank a simple letter to Europe. This issued took place ten years after the first two NVI for interior tariffs : the "1st" class stamp for priority mail and the "2nd" class for non-priority.

Here, vines begin to multiply everywhere :
* Easy one to cut : Elisabeth II's profil and the light/dark colour binome are from series' designer Arnold Machin (1911-1999), and it will be a stories for anothers days.
* The dark blue binome and the design of the E letter are from graphic designer Jeffery Matthews, less quoted in France than Machin, but it seems British collectors are very fond of him, I begin to think.
* The idea of NVI, I talk about it above, but there is much more to tell.
* The elliptic perforation on the last third of the stamp are invented in 1993 to fight falsification (read an article in French by Dominique of the Blog philatélie about a perforator).
* For the disparition of this E stamp on April, 1st 2004, the British tariff jungle and the are-NVI-in-the-interest-of-the-clients questions open the dorr to a world I have never imagined since wednesday afternoon...

To go further
Apart a machete :
* In the June 2007 issue of Stamp Magazine, Richard West presents two specialised articles about the first Machin that were pre-decimals (1967-1970) and one monography about One pound Machin. These articles are a big first step into the history of Machin and their content is bigger than the article's titles.
* I advice you the Machin Mania section of GBStamps.com website where I find intels about the E stamp : news of 1999 and of 2003.