Special stamps are categories of stamp issues that indicate a limited or specialized status for the stamps in question. Special stamps include Semipostals, Airmails, Pneumatic Post, Special Deliveries, Registration stamps, insurance stamps, newspaper stamps, Official stamps, Revenue stamps and much more. For most stamp issuing entities there are far more special stamps than there are regular postage issues. The United States for instance has issued over 3000 regular issues, but there are far more than 3000 Revenue issues alone listed in the Scott catalog. Belgium has issued over 1200 Semipostals and over 500 Parcel Posts. Austria has hundreds of Postage Dues, Italy has hundreds if not thousands of Offices Abroad. These stamps originally were issued as special stamps as a form of internal post office control to signal to postal workers that a special service had been paid for and was needed.
Postal service has become very streamlined world wide in the last fifty years and the multitude of different postage rates and various services have declined. Airmail ceased to exist as a designated service in the 1960’s and all first class mail that would benefit from air service goes that way without designation. No countries issues postage dues anymore. And Semipostals have always been more charity driven than they are issued for postal need. Part of this is postal change and part is a Special Stamps weariness on the part of catalog makers. For example, the vast numbers of bulk rate regular issue coils that have been issued by the United States for the last twenty years would, in a bye gone era, have received special stamp status as stamps issued for bulk rate postage only and may well have graced our collections as BR numbers. Today they are just hard to navigate issues in the regular catalog section.