Portal:Philately

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.

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

Bristol Customshouse and Post Office in 2013

Bristol Customshouse and Post Office is a historic two-story rectangular Italian palazzo style brick building that was used as a post office and customshouse in Bristol, Rhode Island, United States. The land for the site was acquired for $4,400. The building was designed by Ammi B. Young and completed in 1858 for a cost of $22,135.75. The building roughly measures 46 feet (14 m) by 32 feet (9.8 m) and is constructed of deep red brick and has three arched openings on each of its sides and stories that are lined with sandstone moldings. The archways protrude from the side of the building and the center archway serves as the first floor with the adjacent archways housing large windows that are barred with iron. As it typical of the style, the second floor is more elaborate with a shallow balcony of iron supported by iron brackets and the paneling of the upper facade's surmounting entablature is elaborately decorative. The sides and rear are similar to the front facade, but include blind recesses and the molding is of a browner sandstone.

The building was abandoned in 1962 and acquired by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in 1964. The YMCA has an adjacent structure and used the building as an ante-space until 1990. Currently, the building is used as offices. The Bristol Customshouse and Post Office is historically significant as it is an example of the Italian palazzo mode of architecture. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. (Full article...)

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The postage stamps and postal system of the Confederate States of America carried the mail of the Confederacy for a brief period in U.S. history. Early in 1861 when South Carolina no longer considered itself part of the Union and demanded that the U.S. Army abandon Fort Sumter, plans for a Confederate postal system were already underway. Indeed, the Confederate Post Office was established on February 21, 1861; and it was not until April 12 that the American Civil War officially began, when the Confederate Army fired upon U.S. soldiers who had refused to abandon the fort. However, the United States Post Office Department continued to handle the mail of the seceded states as usual during the first weeks of the war. It was not until June 1 that the Confederate Post Office took over collection and delivery, now faced with the task of providing postage stamps and mail services for its citizens.

The C.S. Constitution had provided for a national postal service to be established, then required it to be self-financing beginning March 1, 1863 (Section 8. Powers of Congress, Item 7). President Jefferson Davis had appointed John Henninger Reagan on March 6, 1861, to head the new Confederate Post Office Department. The Confederate Post Office proved to be very efficient and remained in operation for the entire duration of the Civil War. (Full article...)

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Image 1A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 2A 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 3This 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 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 6Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 7A fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 8Widespread 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 9A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
Image 10A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
Image 11A 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 12Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 13A 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 14United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
... that working at a post office was how Derrick Harden became an NFL player?
... that both of Karl R. Free's New Deal-era U.S. post office murals with Native American subjects have been challenged as offensive?
... 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 after Irish post office clerk Maureen Flavin Sweeney reported worsening weather conditions, Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to postpone D-Day by 24 hours?
... that James Diossa rescued the only public library and post office in Central Falls, Rhode Island, when the city went into bankruptcy?

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

Image 1A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 2Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 3The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 4First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 5Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 6A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 7The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 8Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 9With 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 10The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 11Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 12Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 13The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 14Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 15The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 16Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 17The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 18A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 19The 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 20The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 211834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 22The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 23A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 24The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 25A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 26Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)

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The Jamaica 1956–58 £1 chocolate and violet was a planned, but unissued, Jamaican postage stamp. The stamp's design was identical to the King George VI stamp, issued in 1949, which depicted a scene of workers rolling cigars by hand, but with the vignette image of King George VI replaced with that of Queen Elizabeth II. Although the stamp was abandoned after printing and not issued, there are seven copies in existence. It was replaced by a £1 stamp depicting Jamaica's coat of arms. (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.

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