Lot 4 Canada #BK37cF 1942-1947 War Issue, A Complete 25c French Booklet With 1c Green, 2c Brown & 3c Dark Carmine, Panes Of 4+2 Labels. Front Cover IIq, Type 1B Cover, 6c Inverted Airmail Rate Page. 14mm Staple, 700,000 Issued

A complete 25c French booklet from the 1942-1947 War Issue with 1c green, 2c brown & 3c dark carmine, panes of 4+2 labels. Front cover IIq, type 1b cover. 6c inverted airmail rate page. 14mm staple. 700,000 issued. Unitrade values this booklet at $90 for the booklet with the normal rate page. This is only the second or third example of an inverted rate page that we have seen on this issue. Therefore a more reasonable estimate of the value would be $200.

The booklet offered here grades 78 as follows:

Centering/Margins: 50/70

Cover Freshness: 10/10

Condition of Cover Edges: 5/5

Freshness of the Panes: 5/5

Absence of Visible Cover Flaws or Stains: 3/5

Condition of Interleaving and Contents: 5/5

For the booklets from this issue, the quantities issued refer to the total number of booklets issued for all rate page types, all staple sizes and all Harris front and back cover types for a particular denomination of booklet in English or French. They come from the McCann catalogue, which does not break the quantity down into the individual varieties. Consequently, depending on how many listed types there are, many of these booklets are much, much scarcer than the overall issue quantities would suggest. For example, according to McCann, there were 699,000 English 25c booklets containing four panes of 6 1c green stamps issued. However, there were seven different basic rate-page and cover type combinations, not counting the Harris sub-types. If they were more or less evenly distributed among these types, that is just under 100,000 of each type, and then this gets broken down further into between 2 and 8 Harris sub-types each. So, this places these issue quantities into a more accurate perspective. This is even more acute in the case of the chewing gum booklets for both issues, as for the English booklets there were 16 possible cover combinations, while for the french there were 64, and still for the bilingual there were 225 possible combinations of front and back covers. Some of these are so rare that they have yet to be reported.