London Postal History Group Notebook

The London Postal History Group was founded in 1971 by Peter Forrestier-Smith, who edited their magazine the London Postal History Group Notebook until ill health forced his retirement in 2009. However, sufficient funds remained in the Group treasury to allow an archive of its publications to be scanned by John Parmenter and Anthony Shine and made available on a USB stick. John kindly offered to let the GBPS archive these files on this site.

The collection is in PDF format, and includes 145 editions of the Notebook, numbers 1-173 (some were multiple editions). These contain a large amount of really useful information and are the only source for Barrie Jay's updates to volume 3 (London) of the British County Catalogue. Cumulative subject indexes were also prepared.

What's more, the collection also includes a set of publications totalling some 2,000 pages produced by or associated with the Group, including works on Late Fee mail, numeral cancellations, Krag machines, and an 1850 Postal Directory. (John also included his detailed listings of Post Office numbers, which have been placed under the relevant section of this site.)

Over 4,000 pages were scanned, average scanning parameters were used throughout (i.e. poor originals give a poor scanned image). In the table below, where a double or larger edition was a "special" (as opposed to simply a larger or delayed issue) the contents are noted.