The Thirty-Six Types of the Canada 1898 Two Cent Numeral Issue

Peter Spencer
Released November 2017.
88 pages, 8.5x11, spiral bound.
Colour C$ 24.00 [ISBN 978-1-927119-81-5].

The Thirty-Six Types of the Canada 1898 Two Cent Numeral Issue is the eighth volume in Peter Spencer’s series on the plating of Canada’s Queen Victoria era Numeral Issue, and the third covering specific aspects of the Two Cent value of the issue. Pretty in Pink (2005) covered in depth ways to distinguish between stamps produce by the many different plates used to print the issue. The Joy of Panes (2015) was the first major plating study of the Two Cent stamp in Canada's first booklet pane. In The Thirty-Six Types Peter has accomplished the herculean task of identifying the specific time periods, over the 64 months that it was in production, in which the different plates were actually used to print stamps of the issue. Accomplished by examining 55,000 dated copies, sorting them in chronological order and plating them one by one, it was an incredible amount of work!

Peter Spencer began stamp collecting in the 1950s. After schooling in his native Alberta, he received Physics degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston and the University of Waterloo. He taught Physics for a third of a century and was privileged to be the Head of Science at Leacock Collegiate in Agincourt, Ontario, during the years when it was one of the top twenty Science schools in North America. He was co-author of a physics text which, in one of its editions, was used in the majority of the high schools in Ontario.

On retirement, Peter quietly metamorphosed into a full-time philatelist with the world as his interest, preferably used, pre-1900, engraved, colourful, or odd and unusual - preferably all five together. His interests have touched on a wide range from Afghanistan to the Bomba Heads of Sicily to Zaire. In 2003, he co-taught the ‘Detecting Fakes and Forgeries’ APS Summer Seminar in State College, Pennsylvania with Bill Dixon.