The first country to issue Official stamps was Great Britain. It did so at the same time that it issued the first stamp, the Penny Black. But Great Britain was scooped in one major aspect of Official stamps by the United States Post Office, and that was in the issuance of Departmental Officials
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Probably the best philatelic magazine that is published anywhere in the world is the “The American Philatelist”, which is the monthly journal of the American Philatelic Society. Over eighty pages each month, the magazine serves partly as a member bulletin. But the real interest each month is the numerous detailed articles written by members, mostly about their
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The specialty area of United States Revenues may be the most fertile collecting specialty for collectors. Scott lists the general issue revenues which are interesting enough. But it is in the field of the specialty revenues where collectors have had the most fun. There are specialty Revenues for everything from Perfume Tax Stamps to Consular Office Revenues (which paid the tax
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One of the more ironic things about specialized philately is that collectors are far more likely to collect older issues in a highly specialized degree than they are to collect more modern stamps in the same degree of detail. Penny Blacks are specialized by plate number. There were 12 plates- each of which can only be
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Confederate States philately has always enjoyed enormous popularity. The stamps are interestingly printed, served a real postal purpose, and the story behind the stamps has real philatelic appeal- large nation, rent by discord, one section withdraws from union to preserve the ability to own human beings as property, the other side fights to retain the
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Unbeknownst to a mass of collectors, one of the major changes brought about in our hobby as a result of the Internet age is greater democratization. In the pre-1900 period, philatelic organizations didn’t count for much- there were few of them, and they had few members. The American Philatelic Society began to become powerful in the
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Every field has party games. Physicists have Schroedinger’s cat. Theologists discuss the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. And philatelists discuss what country would be the hardest to complete and, if complete, what country would be the most valuable. The most difficult countries to complete would obviously be those
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Each Country has quirky collecting habits related to how their stamps were printed and to the marginal markings that originally contained printer’s information or advertising. Israeli collectors collect their stamps with tabs, which are inscriptions that appear in the margins and which are collected attached to the stamps themselves. French collectors collect milliseme pairs, which are margin pairs with
Collectors and dealers of the 1930s and 1940s looked at the obstacles to increasing the popularity of US philately and decided that unnecessary complexity was off putting to new entrants to the hobby. This feeling was created by four things. First, the classic one cent and ten cent 1851 with their different minor plate types being
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