These cards are issued by Royal Mail for every new stamp. Your three and Rod's Kew Gardens are examples. Some of the early ones are very rare. They started to issue these in 1973 I believe.
they are called PHQ cards as the post office gives each card a "PHQ" serial number. They started being issued in 1973, initially one stamp from each set was turned into a postcard and then all the stamps from each set. Often they come with the stamp that is shown cancelled at the bottom left on the front with a First Day of Issue cancellation.....if the stamp is on the reverse they are worth less. 1978 issues from a 2009 edition of Gibbons Concise Great Britain Catalogue catalogue as follows for complete sets....Energy Resources, (25 Jan)....£3 mint, £6 used////British Architecture (1 March)....£3 mint, £6 used////25th Anniversary Coronation, (31 May)....£3 mint, £6 used////Horses (5th July) mint £2.25, used £5.75////Bicycling (2nd August)....£2.25 mint, £5 used////Christmas mint £2.25, used £5.00.
You should be able to buy them massively discounted from these prices as a very large "Investment" holding came on to the market a couple of years ago.
Also Gibbons prices often bear no relationship to the "real" world pricing.
My favourite set is the one issued for the 1st set in 1979...Dogs. They are cheap to buy and look very nice framed.
Each card is numbered sequentially by Royal Mail as PHQ1, PHQ2, etc.. They can be found in the Stanley Gibbons Great Britain catalogues (well my 2005 Concise has them anyway) with the regular stamp and FDC listings for each stamp.
From SG front of catalogue boring fine print:
(Obverse means the picture side of the postcard and reverse means the side you usually write on.)
Just to revive this topic for a moment... Here is a case of Royal Mail getting it wrong with their PHQ cards. The 2004 Ocean Liners stamp on the left is the issued version but the PHQ card on the right does not match. The same "error" is repeated with the miniature sheet that was issued. The corresponding PHQ card depicting the miniature sheet ...doesn't correspond.
On the subject of the Royal Mail getting things wrong on their PHQ cards, when the cards were issued for the Magical Worlds series in 1998, the name of the author of The Hobbit was erroneously printed as "J.R.R. Tolkein". They later sent out replacement cards with the name corrected to "J.R.R. Tolkien".
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Posted 06/02/2011 11:41 pm
