Have Se-Tenants Lost Their Meaning In The Self-Adhesive Era?

I was thinking about this earlier. Self adhesive stamps aren't really connected the way gummed stamps are. They're really just a bunch of individual stamps stuck next to each other.

Collecting a strip of five or a block of four is really no different that having the individual stamps loose.

Opinions?

Agreed. Even more so with some of the newer coil stamps that have intentional spacing between the paper backing (i.e. Spectrum Eagle, 45c Weathervanes, etc.). However, the US Postal Service knows there are collectors who will attempt to buy every combination and therefore it's profit for them to keep issuing them.

Have you also noticed that blocks of 4 stamps have given way to strips of 5 stamps (presumably for higher profits for the postal service). Take for example the Aloha Shirts, the Bonsai Booklet, etc.

Even when blocks of 4 exist (such as in the upcoming Flag definitive stamps), we have phosphored and unphosphored tagging, different printers, different image sizes, different printing processes and even different ink colors used to create the images. All of these "varieties" are collectible to some specialists, at pure profit to the US Postal Service who knows that collectors of the stamps will willingly pay for these "varieties" that won't see circulation but will be stored in a collector's album somewhere.

Absolutely. One cannot have true Se-Tenants, Tete-Beche,Pairs or strips with Self-Adhesives.

They might look like it, but in reality are not.
I collect Tete-Beche pairs but will never include Self-Adhesives in the album...never.

Londonbus1

What does one do with the wanna be se-tenant self-adhesive stamps put out now? What could they be called?

Say a strip of five different stamps with designs that are joined together but now the stamps aren't joined, except when new and still in the booklet or sheet?

Again, I'll re-iterate and not to sound brash or condescending or anything of the sort but that's why I chose to stop my collection at around 1976-'79. They just are not the same. I'm old-school and proud of it. Nothing at all against the modern collector or the purist but it's just not for me.

Sp. if you stopped 76-79, what after that era turns you off? Volume? Theme of stamps? The USPS vs USPOD?

Isn't a lot of the variations of similar stamps mentioned by wt1 due to the different printers involved more so than any attempt by the USPS trying to fleece collectors?

Positional Se-Tenants.

I'm still at a loss to accurately explain this:



The stamps have backing paper and are not attached and were never meant to be attached, but the fact is that five different designs exist in the same coil roll, so does it make them se-tenant, even if they aren't connected or is there another name for it?

I would think the spacing between the Weathervane stamps would be useful for some sort of machinery to automactically place the stamps on envelopes - maybe preventing a jam, especially since the stamps come in rolls of 3,000 and 10,000.

I believe you are correct about the need for spacing on these high volume rolls of stamps by volume mailers, but the question is still open: Are these se-tenant stamps? Since they are not connected to each other in any way, technically the stamps are not; but when more than one design is incorporated into the same coil roll of stamps as in this example, if they are not se-tenant, then what are they called?

I suppose valid answer(s) to this question can rest with how you interpret the phrase "se tenant". Since stamps were once printed as gummed sheets of perforated stamps, it became the norm in stamp collecting that "se tenant" meant "joined" stamps. But I'm not sure if "se tenant" can be interpreted at all with the meaning of joined. I do believe that one interpretation of tenant means locale or site and adding se means at the same time. Therefore, one interpreatation of se tenant could be "printed at the same locale at the same time", but not necessarily joined like Siamese twins. Under this interpretation, all self-adhesive stamps printed at the same time and on a common backing would be "se-tenant."

We can just call them self-adhesive se-tenants and be done with it.

there ya go - we are making philatelic definition history!

Collecting a strip of five or a block of four is really no different that having the individual stamps loose.

This is basically true and I would collect them either way. One could generalize, however, that the closer you can get to the original "condition" the stamps were issued in, the better in terms of being able to sell a stamp to some individuals. Hence, a plate block may cost more than 4 individual stamps, a booklet with the cover may cost more than the stamps alone, and a set of self-adhesives connected on the original backing paper may cost more than the same stamps loose.

Interesting discussion.

Here's another related question:

Plate number positions notwithstanding, how does one collect the five stamps making up the "strip" shown as in the above example. Must you wait for Scott to come up with a catalog number and collect the stamps in a strip Scott numerically identifies, or does it matter where a strip starts and stops? In other words, if I elected to collect a strip starting with the cow, would it change the value of the strip in anyway as long as all five stamps were represented?

I understand that plate number collectors would demand that the central stamp be the one with the plate number, but if a plate number wasn't at issue, does it matter what strip of 5 is collected to have a "complete" strip?