Philately is the study of postage stamps and postal history. It also refers to the collection and appreciation of stamps and other philatelic products. While closely associated with stamp collecting and the study of postage, it is possible to be a philatelist without owning any stamps. For instance, the stamps being studied may be very rare or reside only in museums.
Stamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps and related objects. It is an area of philately, which is the study of stamps. It has been one of the world's most popular hobbies since the late nineteenth century with the rapid growth of the postal service, as a stream of new stamps was produced by countries that sought to advertise their distinctiveness through their stamps.
In philately, gum is the substance applied to the back of a stamp to enable it to adhere to a letter or other mailed item. The term is generic, and applies both to traditional types such as gum arabic and to synthetic modern formulations. Gum is a matter of high importance in philately.
Postal history is the study of postal systems and how they operate and, or, the study of the use of postage stamps and covers and associated postal artifacts illustrating historical episodes in the development of postal systems. The term is attributed to Robson Lowe, a professional philatelist, stamp dealer and stamp auctioneer, who made the first organised study of the subject in the 1930s and described philatelists as "students of science", but postal historians as "students of humanity". More precisely, philatelists describe postal history as the study of rates, routes, markings, and means.
Philatelic investment is investment in collectible postage stamps for the purpose of realizing a profit. Philatelic investment was popular during the 1970s but then fell out of favour following a speculative bubble and prices of rare stamps took many years to recover.
A postal marking is any kind of annotation applied to a letter by a postal service. The most common types are postmarks and cancellations; almost every letter will have those. Less common types include forwarding addresses, routing annotations, warnings, postage due notices and explanations, such as for damaged or delayed mail and censored or inspected mail. A key part of postal history is the identification of postal markings, their purpose, and period of use.
Registered mail is a postal service in many countries which allows the sender proof of mailing via a receipt and, upon request, electronic verification that an article was delivered or that a delivery attempt was made. Depending on the country, additional services may also be available, such as:
In forensic science, questioned document examination (QDE) is the examination of documents potentially disputed in a court of law. Its primary purpose is to provide evidence about a suspicious or questionable document using scientific processes and methods. Evidence might include alterations, the chain of possession, damage to the document, forgery, origin, authenticity, or other questions that come up when a document is challenged in court.
ISO/IEC 6523Information technology – Structure for the identification of organizations and organization parts is an international standard that defines a structure for uniquely identifying organizations and parts thereof in computer data interchange and specifies the registration procedure to obtain an International Code Designator (ICD) value for an identification scheme.
The Defense Science Board (DSB) is a committee of civilian experts appointed to advise the U.S. Department of Defense on scientific and technical matters. It was established in 1956 on the second Hoover Commission's recommendation.
The Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL) is the oldest philatelic society in the world. It was founded on 10 April 1869 as The Philatelic Society, London. The society runs a postal museum, the Spear Museum of Philatelic History, at its headquarters in the City of London.
The Hawaiian Missionaries are the first postage stamps of the Kingdom of Hawaii, issued in 1851. They came to be known as the "Missionaries" because they were primarily found on the correspondence of missionaries working in the Hawaiian Islands. Only a handful of these stamps have survived to the present day, and so they are amongst the great rarities of philately.
During the period when Heligoland was a British possession, about 20 postage stamps were issued between 1867 and 1890. There were up to eight printings of a single denomination and also a large volume of reprints which are known as the Berlin, Leipzig and Hamburg Reprints, respectively. The Berlin reprints are sometimes better quality than the originals. The reprints were done between 1875 and 1895. Consequently, many "old" collections contain reprints rather than originals. Some believe there were seven million reprints as compared to the known 1½ million originals, of which perhaps half were sold through the post office and the remainder sold to dealers when withdrawn from use. A few printings were never postally sold but nevertheless found their way into the hands of dealers. The stamps were printed by the Prussian State Printing Office in Berlin. They were denominated in the Hamburg Schilling until 1875, when both German Reich and British values appeared on each stamp issue. All are embossed with a silhouette of Queen Victoria excepting the four highest values which represent Heligoland escutcheons.
In general, philatelic fakes and forgeries are labels that look like postage stamps but have been produced to deceive or defraud. Learning to identify these can be a challenging branch of philately.
David Feldman MA. BBS, RDP(I).FRPSL is a professional philatelist, auctioneer, art specialist and author. He held his first stamp auction in 1967. Feldman is Honorary Chairman of David Feldman SA, a Geneva-based auction company, through which he attained record prices for some of the world's most famous postage stamps. In 1993, Feldman auctioned the "Bordeaux Cover", which comprised the 1847 1d Orange-red and the 2d Deep Blue Mauritius "Post Office" stamps, which brought 6,175,000 Swiss francs including all commissions, at that time the highest price ever paid for any philatelic item. He also sold the unique 1855 Sweden Treskilling Yellow stamp at auction in 1996, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a single stamp, for which he was pictured in the Guinness Book of Records. That record was eclipsed in 2014 by the sale of the British Guiana 1c magenta.
The Philatelic Foundation is a philatelic organization granted a charter in 1945 by the University of the State of New York as a Nonprofit Educational Institution.
Louise Boyd Dale was a philatelist of the first rank, and the daughter of fellow philatelist Alfred F. Lichtenstein.
Herbert J. Bloch, who emigrated from Europe to New York City in 1936, was a philatelist and stamp dealer who became recognized as a leading expert on authentication of rare European postage stamps.
David Richard Beech MBE was the curator of the British Library Philatelic Collections from 1983–2013. He is a fellow and past president of the Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL). In 2013, it was announced that Beech was to receive the Smithsonian Philatelic Achievement Award for outstanding lifetime accomplishments in the field of philately.
Philatelic expertisation is the process whereby an authority is asked to give an opinion whether a philatelic item is genuine and whether it has been repaired or altered in any way.
