Portal:Philately

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Philately Portal

The United States Accomplishments in Space Commemorative Issue of 1967

Philately is the study of revenue or postage stamps. This includes the design, production, and uses of stamps after they are issued. A postage stamp is evidence of pre-paying a fee for postal services. Postal history is the study of postal systems of the past. It includes the study of rates charged, routes followed, and special handling of letters.

Stamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps and related objects, such as covers (envelopes, postcards or parcels with stamps affixed). It is one of the world's most popular hobbies, with estimates of the number of collectors ranging up to 20 million in the United States alone.

More about philately and stamp collecting

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Recognized content - show another

Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

Smith c. 1924

Dean Cullen Smith (September 27, 1899 – March 4, 1987) was a pioneer American mail pilot, test pilot, flying instructor, Antarctic pilot, and airline pilot. At 17 years of age, he became the youngest flight instructor in U.S. Army history. He was a lead pilot for the U.S. Postal Service's airmail service, and was the first pilot to initiate night air mail flights. He was an executive for many airlines and aircraft companies.

Smith was a pilot for the Byrd Antarctic Expedition of 1928–1930 involved in aerial overflights to discover new land that could be claimed for the benefit of the United States. The land was later viewed by Byrd and named after his wife. Smith was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Congressional Gold Medal. An Antarctic peak bears his name. He was inducted into the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in 1986. (Full article...)

List of recognized articles

Selected article - show another

Keystone B-6 twin-engine air mail plane of the US Army Air Corps in snow storm

The Air Mail scandal, also known as the Air Mail fiasco, is the name that the American press gave to the political scandal resulting from a 1934 congressional investigation of the awarding of contracts to certain airlines to carry airmail and the subsequent disastrous use of the U.S. Army Air Corps to fly the mail after the contracts were revoked.

During the administration of President Herbert Hoover, Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1930. Using its provisions, Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown held a meeting with the executives of the top airlines, later dubbed the "Spoils Conference", in which the airlines effectively divided among themselves the air mail routes. Acting on those agreements, Brown awarded contracts to the participants through a process that effectively prevented smaller carriers from bidding, resulting in a Senate investigation. (Full article...)

List of selected articles

Selected images

Image 1A crash cover is any type of cover, (including air accident cover, interrupted flight cover, wreck cover) meaning any piece of mail that has been recovered from a fixed-wing aircraft, airship or aeroplane crash, train wreck, shipwreck or other postal transportation accident during its journey from sender to recipient. In many cases it was possible to recover some or even all of the mail being carried and the postal authorities typically apply a postal marking (cachet), label, or mimeograph that gets affixed to the cover explaining the delay and damage to the recipient, and possibly enclose the letter in an "ambulance cover" or "body bag" if it was badly damaged and forwarded to its intended destination.
Image 2Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 3A magnifying glass is a convex lens which is used to produce a magnified image of an object. The lens is usually mounted in a frame with a handle though other designs are produced. A magnifying glass works by creating a magnified virtual image of an object behind the lens. Stamp collectors frequently use magnifying glasses to inspect their stamps. This photograph shows the magnified image of the Deutsche Post 1 Reichsmark stamp issued on May 12 1946.
Image 4Cover sent by Zeppelin from Gibraltar on 20 November 1934 to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via London and Berlin for the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 that took place between the 8th and 19th. The two red "MIT LUFTSCHIFF GRAF ZEPPELIN" and green circular marking were applied by the post office. This is a printed matter item that has been registered.
Image 5Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 6A postal stationery envelope used from London to Düsseldorf in 1900, with additional postage stamp perfinned "C & S" identifying the user as "Churchill & Sim" per the seal on the reverse shown on inset. A perfin, the contraction of 'PERForated INitials', is a pattern of tiny holes punched through a postage stamp. Organizations used perforating machines to make perforations forming letters or designs in postage stamps with the purpose of preventing pilferage. It is often difficult to identify the originating uses of individual perfins because there are often no identifying features but when a perfin is affixed to a cover that has some user identifying feature, like a company name, address, or even a postmark or cancellation of a known town where the company had offices, this enhances the perfin.
Image 7United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875
Image 8This is a very scarce use of the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black, used on first day of valid use, May 6, 1840, tied by red Maltese Cross cancellation on folded cover to Warwickshire, brown "C MY-6 1840" first day datestamp on backflap verifies date of use. This was sold as lot 1018 at Robert Siegal's 2006 Rarities of the World auction for $45,000.
Image 9A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 10A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
Image 11A fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 12Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 13Widespread hoarding of coins during the American Civil War created a shortage, prompting the use of stamps for currency. To be sure, the fragility of stamps made them unsuitable for hand-to-hand circulation, and to solve this problem, John Gault invented the encased postage stamp in 1862. A normal U. S. stamp was wrapped around a circular cardboard disc and then placed inside a coin-like circular brass jacket.
Image 14A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that an investigation into the Royal Oak post office shootings led one congressman to accuse the Postal Service of having been "asleep at the switch"?
... that Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
... that Argentinian Ricardo D. Eliçabe qualified as a physician, co-founded a petroleum refinery, and wrote about forgeries of Bolivia's first stamps?
... that in 2007, Arthur Gray's £2 Kangaroo and Map stamp sold for a world record price for a single Australian stamp?
... that after the British Army captured New York City in 1776, Samuel Loudon fled to the village of Fishkill, where he founded the state's first post office?
... that in 1850, about a quarter of the post offices of the Swiss Post were located in taverns?

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various philately-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 2The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 3The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 4A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 5The 1985 postage stamp for the 115th birth anniversary of Vladimir Lenin. Portrait of Lenin (based on a 1900 photography of Y. Mebius in Moscow) with the Tampere Lenin Museum. (from Postage stamp)
Image 6The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 7Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 8A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 9Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 10Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 11Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 12Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 13The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 14Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 15First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 16A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 17A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 18The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 19The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 20With the growth of urban centres across the Western hemisphere in the 19th century Post Offices were located on main arterial routes (from Postal history)
Image 21The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 22A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 231834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 24Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 25The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 26The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)

Selected stamp - show another

The Jamaica 6d abolition of slavery postage stamp was prepared for issue in June 1921 but cancelled shortly before issue due to political unrest and the controversial subject matter.

By some estimates, 416,000 stamps were printed and sent to the island in three shipments. The first two consignments arrived in Jamaica around the same time, and were incinerated at the General Penitentiary in Kingston on July 2, 1921. The final consignment, arriving in October, was similarly destroyed. The Crown Agents were then instructed to destroy the 7220 stamps held in their possession along with about 740 stamps distributed via the Universal Postal Union. Two blocks of four were preserved; one block was given to King George V for his collection, while the other became part of the official collection held at the General Post Office in Kingston. This block mysteriously disappeared from the Post Office's vaults and reappeared sometime later as four singles. (Full article...)

List of selected stamps

List articles

Selected lists

Related portals

Topics

WikiProject

WikiProject Philately organizes the development of articles relating to philately. For those who want to skip ahead to the smaller articles, the WikiProject also maintains a list of articles in need of improvement or that need to be started. There are also many red inked topics that need to be started on the list of philatelic topics page.

edit

Selected works

Williams, Louis N., & Williams, Maurice (1990). Fundamentals of Philately {revised ed.). American Philatelic Society. ISBN 0-9335-8013-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Hornung, Otto (1970). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Stamp Collecting. Hamlyn. ISBN 0-600-01797-4.
Stuart Rossiter & John Fowler (1991). World History Stamp Atlas (reprint ed.). pub: Black Cat. ISBN 0-7481-0309-0.

Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Commons
Free media repository
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals
Wikidata
Free knowledge base
Wikinews
Free-content news
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations
Wikisource
Free-content library
Wikiversity
Free learning tools