When Rowland Hill invented the postage stamp, an integral part of his design was a “wash of mucilage applied to the back, which, when moistened would allow the stamp to adhere to paper.” In the very early years of stamp collecting, collectors primarily collected used stamps. After all, the reasoning went, why spend good money when stamps in the late 1860s was the height of folly? After all, what could they ever be worth?
Led by the Belgian stamp dealer Moens, collectors began collecting unused stamps in the 1870s and 1880s. True, they didn’t display the purpose for which stamps were invented (that is, postal use), but the collectors didn’t have disfiguring cancellations to worry about. So, they pasted the unused stamps in their albums, or if they received stamps with gum, they just licked them down. This is shocking to modern day collectors, but we must all be aware that gum was a meaningless annoyance until the turn of the century. And the hinge, which now seems so barbaric to so many, wasn’t even used by most collectors. Paste was used as often as not. Indeed, in stamp papers of the 1890s, one can page through an entire year’s run without encountering any references to gum, except for methods of removing it. Until 1930, controversy raged over whether to collect unused stamps with original gum at all. “Is it original gum?” may be the most common question in philately today, as it has taken on a much greater meaning than ever before. Due to the extreme rise in price of never hinged stamps, great emphasis has been placed on ascertaining original gum, as this is the only way that you can be sure of never hinged.
Determining whether a stamp has original gum is not an easy matter. So very many stamps are found regummed nowadays. When our firm was first started, only comparatively expensive stamps were regummed. But today, a regummer, armed with his pail and mucilage, can buy hinged stamps, wash off the gum, and regum them. An afternoon’s work will net this moral dwarf 300 or 400 percent profit. So it behooves collectors to know how to tell original gum. It is inconvenient, expensive, and time consuming to send every one of your purchases off to the Philatelic Foundation or the American Philatelic Expertization Service, and they just expertize using the technique outlined below.
Knowledge of stamp printing is required in telling regummed stamps. When stamps are printed, they are printed on a sheet of paper which is then gummed and perforated. This is the clue to expertizing gum. On genuinely gummed stamps, the perforations are applied after the stamp has been gummed. On regummed stamps, the gum is applied after the perforations have been made. If you take an ordinary 15