Portal:Philately

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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.

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A "Sieger cover"

In June 1972, a scandal involving the crew of NASA's Apollo 15 became publicly known. The crew—David Scott, Alfred Worden, and James Irwin—had carried about 400 unauthorized postal covers (stamped and postmarked envelopes) into space and to the Moon's surface on the Lunar Module Falcon. Some of the envelopes were sold at high prices by West German stamp dealer Hermann Sieger, and are known as "Sieger covers". Scott, Worden, and Irwin all agreed to take payments for carrying the covers. Although they returned the money, they were reprimanded by NASA. Amid much press coverage of the incident, the astronauts were called before a closed session of a Senate committee and never flew in space again.

The three astronauts and an acquaintance, Horst Eiermann, had agreed to have the covers made and taken into space. Each astronaut was to receive about US$7,000 (equivalent to $52,620 in 2024). Scott arranged to have the covers postmarked on the morning of the Apollo 15 launch on July 26, 1971. They were packaged for space and brought to him as he prepared for liftoff; he brought them aboard in a pocket of his space suit. They were not included on the list of the personal items he was taking into space. The covers spent July 30 to August 2 on the Moon inside Falcon. On August 7, the date of splashdown, the covers were postmarked again on the recovery carrier USS Okinawa. One hundred were sent to Eiermann (and passed on to Sieger); the remaining covers were divided among the astronauts. (Full article...)

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Opened up 1628 lettersheet showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse

In philatelic terminology a letter sheet, often written lettersheet, is a sheet of paper that can be folded, usually sealed (most often with sealing wax in the 18th and 19th centuries), and mailed without the use of an envelope, or it can also be a similar item of postal stationery issued by a postal authority. Letter sheets derive from the form in which written correspondence was made up before the mid-19th century—letters were written on one or more sheets of paper that were folded and sealed in such a way that the address could be written on the outside.

The term lettersheet has been used to describe the unstamped folded sheet letters used before envelopes became popular. Recent academic research and conservation initiatives have termed such folded and sealed letters as "letterpackets”; however, only a relatively small number of early examples, such as the Brienne Collection (1689–1706) at The Hague, are known to exist. Envelopes were not used much before the second half of the 19th century, because most countries' postal rates calculated for the extra sheet of paper that made up the envelope, thereby increasing the cost of mailing when an envelope was used. (Full article...)

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Image 1Cover 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 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 3Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 4A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 5Widespread 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 6Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 7A 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 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 fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 10A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
Image 11United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875
Image 12A 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 13A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
Image 14A 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.

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... that Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?

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

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

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The Golden Monkey Stamp or Gēngshēn Monkey is a postage stamp issued in China in 1980 of which 5 million copies were printed. Although not rare, the stamp has come to symbolise the strong market for collectable postage stamps in Asia. Demand for the stamp has made it one of the most sought after contemporary Chinese stamps. (Full article...)

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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.

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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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)

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