Postage Stamps

Collectible Postage Stamps And Why They Are

Philatelist is a strange sounding word, and it doesn't really sound anything like what it means. It is someone who collects postage stamps. For a lot of people, it can be a fun, casual hobby. Some people just like to accumulate large collections of brightly colored and artfully decorated stamps.

For other people, it is serious business! They will search for years to find just the right example of a particular stamp, and the stamp's condition is critical. For some, one little perforation torn off too short, one tiny crease, or (perish the thought) the stamp actually being canceled, is a disaster. Yet, oddly enough, sometimes a cancellation mark is just what they want. Sometimes, bright and beautiful and colorful are not good traits for a stamp to have.

One must consider the following question: what makes a stamp collectible? Now, to just your average run of the mill collector, they want the Elvis stamp, the Dumbo stamp, the brightly colored fun stuff. However, to a serious collector, those kinds of stamps are an insult, and they want nothing to do with them. No, if they are going to collect a stamp, it has to be rare. So, what makes a stamp rare? It is so simple a question. Something becomes rare when it is not popular, or it's a fluke, a mistake.

As a little side example: many years ago, the Lionel Toy Company issued a pink locomotive in an effort to get girls interested in toy trains. It was a monumental failure; almost none of them were sold. So, the company recalled all the remaining ones in the stores, painted them black and sold them as regular trains. Today, if you can find one of those pink trains, it will fetch a pretty nice price at a toy convention. If memory serves, I believe the last one sold for somewhere around $1,000.

The same holds true for stamps. The single most valuable stamp in the world is the 1856 one-cent "Black on Magenta" of British Guiana, with a cancellation mark. It's really a rather ugly thing: rectangular, with the corners snipped off to give it a rough octagonal shape. In 1980, it sold for $935,000! So, if you go by weight alone, that would make it just about the single most valuable object in the world.

Now, on the other hand, something like the 1918 "Inverted Jenny" is a mistake. The stamp was supposed to show the image of a Curtiss JN-4 airplane. But, one of the sheets got put in the printer the wrong way. The result: the plane came out upside down. With only one sheet of a hundred stamps, that made them quite rare. As late as 2005, a single one of them sold for $525,000.

So, whether a person collects stamps for fun or profit, being a philatelist holds the potential for hours (if not years) of excitement and pleasure.