Royal Mail is issuing a miniature sheet of four stamps to coincide with the opening of the Paralympic Games on August 29.
The Welcome to the London 2012 Paralympic Games miniature sheet is similar in style to the Welcome to the Olympic Games sheet issued in July (August issue, page 22), featuring aquartet of sports merged with images of the city’s landmarks.
It will make Royal Mail the first postal administration of a host country to issue stamps to celebrate the start of the Paralympics.
Royal Mail is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Britain’s greatest novelist, Charles Dickens, with a set of six stamps and a miniature sheet to be issued on June 19.
They feature popular characters from 10 of his most famous novels, as drawn during the 19th century.
In the case of the sheet stamps, the illustrations are adapted from Character Sketches from Charles Dickens by Joseph Clayton Clarke (known as ‘Kyd’); in the case of the miniature sheet, they are from book illustrations by Hablot Knight Brown (known as ‘Phiz’).
Royal Mail is marking the culmination of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations with a set of eight stamps featuring archive photographs of her taken at a variety of significant events over the past 60 years.
The stamps will be issued on May 31, in time for the Jubilee bank holiday events of June 4-5.
Issued in four se-tenant pairs, each comprising one colour and one black-and-white design, they give an insight into the diverse duties the Queen performs, from delivering Christmas broadcasts to reviewing troops as the head of the UK’s armed forces.
The Great British Fashion issue on May 15 brings together the best post-war design from the fashion houses which put Britain at the forefront of world couture.
Printed in litho by Cartor, in se-tenant strips of five, the stamps were created by Johnson Banks, who commissioned fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø to shoot the outfits.
Live models were used to achieve dynamic postures and a sense of movement, but they do not appear on the final designs.
Italian definitives in the first half of the 20th century were not known for their consistency of design.
The first three decades had seen various values added piecemeal to at least three different blueprints, and even the Imperiale and Democratica series of the 1930s and 1940s still comprised numerous different types.
Things had improved with the Provincial Occupations (or Italy at Work) series in 1950, which was recognisable as a cohesive collection rather than a motley range of designs, even if its large format made it awkward for everyday use.
Charles Holmes, a young writer from Melbourne, peered across the vast rocky Australian outback to the west of Alice Springs, anxious to obtain photographs for a newly launched travel magazine.
Barely discernable in the shimmering haze, he picked out a magnificent example of Aboriginal manhood.
Royal Mail’s alphabetical journey around UK landmarks, which began with the letters A to L in October last year, concludes with the letters M to Z on April 10.
Comprising no fewer than 14 1st class stamps, this is Britain’s biggest single special stamp issue to date.
The stamps are being issued in three sheets of 30: one has the designs from M to R in se-tenant strips of six, another has S to X in se-tenant strips of six, and the third has Y and Z in se-tenant pairs; this arrangement also makes vertical strips of each individual design available.
