Queen Victoria died on January 29, 1901. When its next stamp was issued in 1903, Canada replaced Victoria’s picture with King Edward VII’s. The design characteristics of the Edward stamps are similar to the earlier Victoria ones, except that the maple leaves in the top corners have been replaced by Tudor crowns. The maple leaves are still show, but moved down behind the numerals of value. The high values of this set are extremely desirably in well-centered, mint condition; in recent years, collectors have begun to seek used examples of the twenty cent and fifty cent, as the prices of the mint stamps have risen too fast.
As a side point but a salient one, the prices of used stamps and mint stamps never rise in tandem. Rather, when the price of a mint stamp rises more quickly than the collector market can support, collectors begin to turn to used stamps. The mint stamps then become dormant for a time in terms of price rise, as without a large body of collectors around to support the rise, the market cannot continue its quantum leaps. Then used stamps begin to move upward for a while, and percentage-wise, they catch up with the mint stamps. This happens until the used stamps no longer continue to be perceived as a bargain relative to mint stamps, at which time the market for mint again becomes active. This is not a rational, though-out strategy on the part of collectors; rather, it is the result of thousands of collectors each attempting to get the most for their money.
