Game GREEN - ANSWERS
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Picture A is a First Day Cover, so if you marked down A-5, you were right! Congratulations!
A larger picture? Picture B shows a "Flag Cancel", so if you said B-3, you were right again! This was easy, even though you might never have heard of 'flag cancels' before. The cancellation mark on the stamp shows a Royal Flag of some kind. Look closely  and see that the other,
round cancel says "Royal Train" and the date. That must mean that King George VI and Queen
Mary (the parents of Queen Elizabeth) were visiting Canada,
and riding across the country in a special Royal Train. All the mail carried on that train was cancelled this way.
The date on the cancel is May 24, 1939. Now, May 24th was the date of the birthday of Queen Victoria, and in Canada, "Victoria Day" is always celebrated on the closest Monday to May 24th. An interesting coincidence, wasn't it! The year 1939 was also the year that Canada and Britain went to war, in World War 2. But this is way too much history for now!! Picture C shows a very old Canadian stamp that was used before perforations were punched into the sheets of stamps It is imperforate, so if you said C-1, you were correct!! Notice that there are two ink scratches on the stamp? Well, its not cause someone was trying out a new ballpoint pen one day - its because some of the post offices back then just used their pens to mark that the stamp was being used. Those are sometimes called "pen cancels". Picture D shows a spacecraft from the USA joined up with a spacecraft from the Soviet Union, which we sometimes called "Russia" in those days. If you wanted to collect SPACE stamps as a "topic", you would want that stamp! The answer is D-7. Picture E is a little hard to read - want to see a larger one? 
However, you probably spotted the writing in the "margin" of the block of four stamps, and that gave
you the clue that this is a Plate Block. The answer is E-6. Close your eyes and imagine these four stamps in their original sheet of 100 stamps. These four are from the top right hand corner - right? Now, some of the Plate Blocks were from the other 3 corners of the sheet, so you could collect 4 different Plate Blocks for this stamp! It gets better! Sometimes there were more than one "plate" used, so you might have Plate 1, Plate 2, etc. Which Plate is this one from? Number 1, of course! Picture F is from New Zealand. They sure have pretty stamps, don't they? I know you wrote down F-2, for this one! Picture G shows a fish stamp from Singapore. Look it up on your maps! This is a Fish Topic stamp, and you wrote down G-4, didn't you!! I hope you didn't find some of these too hard! Watch for more puzzles in the weeks ahead. Return to Games Return to This Game Return to Pre-Teens Main Page Return to Teens Main Page Return to Main Page Please visit the BNAPS web-site. |
