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Now it doesn’t matter much because high technology printing can pretty much do anything in a jiffy, but in the nineteenth century, it would have been much cheaper if all stamps had been printed in one color. The reason that they weren’t was because different letters to different places in differing weights required different postage.

Great thematic stamp collections help the viewer understand history in new ways. Recently, a collection came our way that underscores this. The collector, a historian, had a thesis that modern history is viewed through too narrow a lens. He took a long view of European history. The Hundred Years’ War, for instance, was never called

$100 or $1,000,000? The reuse of postage stamps was an obsession of postal officials in the mid-nineteenth century. It was the reason that cancellations were used on letters. Still, postal officials in most countries thought this was not enough. They imagined a world of people soaking used postage stamps off envelopes, washing the cancellations either

The nineteenth century was a wonderful time for progress. Rapid scientific advances and technological innovations created a mindset that change was possible, even preferable, and that change could be a positive force. The current attitude is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In the nineteenth century, people looked for better ways to do things.

A collector challenged me recently in an email. Find the first stamp object on your desk, and write an article on it, the only rule being that the item have no obvious philatelic value. As soon as I finished the email, my eyes alighted on the item found above. The Dutch stamp on this cover

At the turn of the twentieth Century, the Post Office of the United States was under constant criticism from philatelists because of our stamp issuing policy. The Post Office had decided to commemorate the 1893 Columbian Exposition with a long commemorative set, and the set they produced (Scott #230-245) had a face value of over $16