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.

More about philately and stamp collecting

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Recognized content - show another

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

A Canadian postal code (French: code postal) is an alphanumeric string, consisting of a pair of three-character groups separated by one space in the middle. The relevant instruction from Canada Post follows.

"Print the postal code in uppercase with the first three characters separated from the last three by one space. Don’t use hyphens."

Canada Post is explicit in that exactly one space is to be used in formatting a postal code, so from a computing perspective, the string contains strictly 7 characters.

The postal code is necessary in forming a complete postal address in Canada. Canada's postal codes are alphanumeric. They are in the format A1A 1A1, where A is a letter and 1 is a digit, with a space separating the third and fourth characters. As of October 2019, there were 876,445 postal codes, using forward sortation areas (FSAs), from A0A in Newfoundland to Y1A in Yukon. (Full article...)

List of recognized articles

Selected article - show another

Colombia is a country in north-western South America. Colombia is bordered by Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. With a population of over 45 million people, Colombia has the second largest population in South America, after Brazil. The capital is Bogotá. (Full article...)

List of selected articles

Selected images

Image 1A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
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 3A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
Image 4Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 5A 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 6This 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 7United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875
Image 8Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)

Image 8Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
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 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 11Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 12Widespread 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 13A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 14Cover 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.

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that Sophie Rain went from living on food stamps to making US$43 million in a year on OnlyFans?
... that Swedish DJ Avicii was featured on a postage stamp in January 2015?
... that a 1991 US postage stamp based on a print by Sabra Field sold more than 60 million copies?
... that Post Office Square does not have any post offices?
... that Swedish DJ Avicii was featured on a postage stamp in January 2015?
... that working at a post office was how Derrick Harden became an NFL player?

General images - load new batch

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

Image 1Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 2Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 3First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 4The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 5The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 6A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 7A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 8Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 9The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 10The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 11The 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 12Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 13A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 14The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 151834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 16The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 17With 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 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 19A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 20A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 21Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 22The 1981 United Nations stamp on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 23Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 24Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 25The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)

Selected stamp - show another

The Double Geneva is a rare Swiss stamp that was issued by the city of Geneva in 1843, making it the third-oldest stamp of the European continent after the Zürich 4 and 6 (1842), and the British Penny Black and Two Penny Blue, (1840). It bears the name Double Geneva for the double image on the stamp and its place of origin.

The stamp has a unique design: each half, at 5 centimes if cut out would pre-pay the postage on letters within the city of Geneva; the whole stamp at 10 centimes pre-paid postage outside the city but within the Canton of Geneva. (Full article...)

List of selected stamps

List articles

Selected lists

Related portals

Topics

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.

edit

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)

Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Commons
Free media repository
Wikidata
Free knowledge base
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations
Wikisource
Free-content library
Wikiversity
Free learning tools