Virtually every stamp was originally sold in perfect condition. And yet, when you look at dealer offerings of rarer stamps, by far the vast majority are damaged in some way, with small thins or creases or no gum leading the list of defects. And the rarer and older the stamp the more likely it is to be damaged. There are two reasons for this. First, until the post WW II period collectors rarely paid as much attention to quality as they do today.Premiums between the quality grades were not as dramatic as they are now and most collectors felt that almost any non-visually defective stamp was just fine in their collections. Because of this, the care that is necessary to maintain high quality in a collection was lacking. Collectors mounted with hinges and the earliest hinges often thinned stamps when improperly applied and removed. And most homes fifty years ago were not air-conditioned and often very humid in the summer. This led to foxing, a form of brown staining that is produced by bacteria feeding off paper in warm damp climates.
Most faulty collector handling is a thing of the past. But the second major factor that damages stamps is one of philately’s dirty secrets-dealer mishandling. Any time I bring this subject up with my dealer peers everyone denies that they have ever damaged a stamp through faulty handling. And yet I know I have. Not many, but then if you are handling thousands of stamps per week for thousands of weeks you can have a very low damage to handling ratio and still have accounted by yourself for a significant number of damaged stamps. It’s easy to put stamps carelessly into a mount or pinch your tongs just a little too hard. When your surgeon makes a quarter of a millimeter misjudgment, you never know about it and it heals. Paper is less forgiving than flesh and when a stamp professional makes the same error, the stamp is permanently damaged. Professionals will never admit that they have damaged a stamp, but it is the only way to account for the extremely high numbers of faulty stamps that entered the dealer stream known to be perfect. After all, the complete sheet of 100 of the Airmail Invert (US Scott #C3a) entered our hobby in perfect condition as a known and recognized rarity (so you would think people would have been careful with it) less than 100 years ago. Today, only a very few are in perfect quality and some have even been lost.