Spencer, Peter (2006). Blue Opaline: The Exceptional Plate One of the Canada Five Cent 1898 Numeral Issue.

Blue Opaline – The Exceptional Plate One of the Canada Five Cent 1898 Numeral Issue follows closely on the 2006 release of The Wearing of the Green: Plates and States of the Canada 1898 One Cent Numeral Issue and the 2005 release of Pretty in Pink: The Plates and States of the Canada 1898 Two Cent Numeral Issue. Again using today’s technology to great advantage, in this volume the author has closely examined the Five-cent value of the popular Queen Victoria Numeral Issue to advise readers how to determine the position of individual copies from the first plate printings.As with the earlier books, Blue Opaline is the first major plating study of the five-cent value and should form an excellent basis for further studies of this stamp and possible discoveries which readers may make as they examine their holdings. In his introduction Peter states that “The author believes this plate illustrates one of the major siderographic catastrophes of the classic era.”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.