Stamp Perforations

Stamp collecting has always been an International hobby, and there is no better example of this than the issue of measuring perforations. Europeans and Americans differ on how they take temperature (Celsius versus Fahrenheit) and distance (miles versus kilometers). But collectors all around the world use the same types of perforation gauges and count perfs the same way. When we call something perf 12 all collectors mean 12 perforation holes per two centimeters. This early agreement on perfs came without any effort. The French and the Belgians were the world’s philatelic leaders in the mid-Nineteenth Century. They produced the first albums and catalogs, and so it was to them that later catalog makers from other countries turned when it came time to list differing perforation varieties. For the most part, the early Scott catalog copied the differing national sections of the foreign catalogs, using a pirated version of Yvert for France and Michel for Germany. So it was natural to pick up the European way of measuring perfs. This early decision has greatly eased collecting. Imagine if you needed differing perf guages depending on the country you collected. And given how difficult it is to change a system that people are used to (no matter how cumbersome it is) as a hobby we are lucky that J Walter Scott thought it better to copy an existing system then to create his own.