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

Malta's first postage stamp, the Halfpenny Yellow, which was issued for local mail on 1 December 1860

The postal history of Malta began in the early modern period, when pre-adhesive mail was delivered to foreign destinations by privately owned ships for a fee. The earliest known letter from Malta, sent during the rule of the Order of St John, is dated 1532. The first formal postal service on the islands was established by the Order in 1708, with the post office being located at the Casa del Commun Tesoro in Valletta. The first postal markings on mail appeared later on in the 18th century.

The postal service was reformed in 1798 during the French occupation of Malta, and the islands were taken over by the British in 1800. In the early 19th century, two separate post offices were established in Malta: the Island Post Office and the Packet Office, with the latter forming part of the British Post Office. Their operations were amalgamated in 1849, and British postage stamps began to be used in Malta in August 1857. Malta's first postage stamp—the Halfpenny Yellow—was issued in 1860 for use on local mail, while letters sent to foreign destinations continued to be franked with British stamps. (Full article...)

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A postage and revenue stamp, sometimes also called a dual-purpose stamp or a compound stamp, is a stamp which is equally valid for use for postage or revenue purposes. They often but not always bore an inscription such as "Postage and Revenue". Dual-purpose stamps were common in the United Kingdom and the British Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries, and they are still used in some countries as of the early 21st century.

Dual-purpose stamps used for postal purposes usually bear a postmark, while those which are used as revenues bear some form of fiscal cancel (such as a pen cancel, a handstamp or a commercial overprint). (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 2Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 3Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 4This 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 5A fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 6A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
Image 7A 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 8A 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 9United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875
Image 10Widespread 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 11Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 12A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
Image 13A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 14A 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.

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that Argentinian Ricardo D. Eliçabe qualified as a physician, co-founded a petroleum refinery, and wrote about forgeries of Bolivia's first stamps?
... 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?
... that a new Christmas stamp that debuted in the 350-person town of Bethlehem, Georgia, in 1967 got so much attention that the two-employee post office had to hire forty-three temporary workers?
... that British philatelist Alma Lee specialised in the "standing Helvetia" stamps of Switzerland?
... 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"?

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

Image 1The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 2The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 3The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 41834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 5The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 6Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 7Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 8A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 9A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 10The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 11The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 12The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 13Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 14Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 15The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 16The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 17Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 18Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 19First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 20The 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 21A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 22A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 23With 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 24Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 25A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 26Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)

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A corner pair of the stamp.

The Jamaica 1sh inverted-frame error was discovered in March 1922 at the post office in Manchioneal, a village in the parish of Portland, Jamaica. An entire sheet of 60 stamps on multiple CA paper existed, but only half of this sheet was sent to Manchioneal. The majority of these may have been used for fiscal purposes, because Manchioneal was a banana trading centre and buyers may have used the telegraph office to confirm purchases. The other half of the sheet was possibly sold over the counter in Jamaica's capital, Kingston, because a copy with a Kingston cancellation exists.

Only 5 examples are known in used condition, 4 with a Manchioneal cancel and only 1 with a Kingston cancel. (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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