Portal:Philately

Wikipedia portals: Culture Geography Health History Mathematics Natural sciences People Philosophy Religion Society Technology Main Portal   Philately WikiProject   Categories & Statistics edit   The Philately Portal 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... Show new selections edit   Selected article Postal history is the study of postal systems and how they operate and, or, the collecting of covers and associated material illustrating historical episodes 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". Postal history has become a philatelic collecting speciality in its own right. While philately is concerned with the study of the stamps per se, postal history can include the study of postal rates, postal policy, postal administration, political effects on postal systems, postal surveillance and the consequences of politics, business, and culture on postal systems; basically anything to do with the function of the collection, transportation and delivery of mail. Areas of special interest include disrupted or transitional periods, such as wars and military occupations, and mail to remote areas. In studying or collecting any postal history subject some overlap is inevitable because it is impossible to separate the different areas that affect the mail from one another. Regional studies like countries of origin, native districts, cities, towns or villages, places associated with family roots, or workplaces, can comprise geographical based postal history studies. In the past collectors usually based their studies on "mail from" but "mail to" and "mail through" a place expand the postal service story because outgoing mail mainly shows marking associated with the areas of study while incoming mail tells a much broader story and are now more likely to be included. Transportation based studies can include, Aerophilately, Balloon mail, Maritime mail, Rocket mail, while subject based studies can include Express mail, Marcophily, Military mail, Postal censorship, Pre-adhesive mail and Registered mail. Suggest • Archive... edit   Selected picture Cover sent by Zeppelin from Chemnitz, Germany to Sausalito, California on the first North American flight of the LZ 129 Hindenburg, 6 -9 May 1936. The "Nach Nord Amerika" and red circular marking were applied by the post office; the latter marking includes a small "d" indicating it was applied at Frankfurt am Main. The postage stamps were issued specially for this trip, and one of them has a piece of the sheet margin bearing a postal control marking still attached. A handstamped indicating the return address of the sender, Kurt Krippner, and a New York City receiving mark dated 9 May are on the reverse. Read more about Zeppelin mail... Suggest • Archive... edit   Selected biography Ralph Allen (1693–1764) was a British mine owner, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who became a Post Office clerk in Bath and on February 13, 1712 became its Postmaster and remained so until 1848. He became Mayor of Bath in 1842. At age twenty-seven Allen received a seven-year contract to control the Cross or Bye Posts that had begun to appear in the seventeenth century; for this he paid £6,000 per year but even though he only broke even he continued. He reformed the postal service by creating a network of postal roads that did not pass through London. It is estimated he saved the Post Office £1,500,000 over a 40 year period having renewed the seven-year contracts until his death. Prior Park, his Palladian mansion was his home from about 1834 until his death. It was built from Bath Stone from his own Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines and located on a hillside overlooking the city of Bath. Suggest • Archive... edit   Things you can do There is a discussion about getting more people involved in Philately on Wikipedia. Join the discussion and share your thoughts here. WikiProject Philately organizes the development of articles relating to philately. The collaboration focuses on one article at a time until they can proudly put that article up as a featured article candidate. This will last until they have run through a pool of "featurable" articles, then they will use a time-based system. Currently there is one philatelic featured article, if you can help with another candidate, please do so. 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. The current Philately collaboration is Aerophilately. Postage stamps of Ireland is a Featured article British Library Philatelic Collections, Postal codes in Canada, and 2009 Royal Mail industrial disputes are Good articles edit   Did you know... ... that the first Penny Post was established in London in 1680 by William Dockwra nearly 200 years before the better known Uniform Penny Post that was part of the postal reforms of 1839 and 1840 in Great Britain. ... that Czesław Słania (1921-2005) is the most prolific stamp engraver, with more than 1,000 post stamps for 28 postal administrations? ... that a forerunner is a postage stamp used during the time period before a region or territory issues stamps of its own? ... that the Royal Philatelic Society is the oldest philatelic society in the world, founded in London in 1869? ... that Marcophily is the specialised study and collection of postmarks, cancellations and postal markings applied by hand or machine on mail? ... that Non-denominated postage are postage stamps that do not show a monetary value on the face? ... that the Daguin machine was a cancelling machine first used in post offices in Paris in 1884? ... that the first airmail of the United States was a personal letter from George Washington carried on an aerial balloon flight from Philadelphia by Jean Pierre Blanchard? edit   Stamp of the month 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 islands. An astonishing lore surrounds this stamp: in 1892, one of its earlier owners, Gaston Leroux, was murdered for it by an envious fellow philatelist, Hector Giroux. Only a handful of these stamps have survived. The stamps went on sale October 1, 1851, in three denominations: 2-cent, 5-cent and 13-cent values. A 6-cent appeared later. The design was very simple, consisting only of a central numeral of the denomination framed by standard printer's ornaments, with the denomination repeated in words at the bottom. Although the stamps were in regular use until as late as 1856, of the four values issued only about 200 have survived, of which 28 are unused, and 32 are on cover. The 2-cent is the rarest of the Hawaiian Missionaries, with 15 copies recorded. When Maurice Burrus sold his 2-cent stamp in 1921 the price was USD$15,000; Alfred Caspary sold the same stamp in 1963 for $41,000, the highest price ever paid for a stamp at the time. The current estimated value of a mint copy is GB £450,000. Suggest • Archive... edit   Selected bibliography Fundamentals of Philately. American Philatelic Society. 1990 revised ed.. ISBN 0-9335-8013-4.  Hornung, Otto (1970). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Stamp Collecting. Hamlyn. ISBN 0-600-01797-4.  World History Stamp Atlas. pub: Black Cat. 1991 reprint. ISBN 0-7481-0309-0.  edit   New articles 25 April 2011 Great Britain commemorative stamps 2010–2019 — 31 May 2010 Postage stamps and postal history of Egypt — 3 January 2010 Mirosław Bojanowicz — 12 December 2009 William Humphrys — 5 December 2009 Postage stamps and postal history of Poland — 23 November 2009 Uniform Fourpenny Post — 14 November 2009 Postage stamps and postal history of British Bechuanaland — 7 October 2009 Postage stamp paper — 15 September 2009 Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation — 8 September 2009 London 2010 Festival of Stamps — 3 September 2009 Primitives — 17 August 2009 Omnibus issue — 10 August 2009 N. Imperato — 30 July 2009 Royal Gibraltar Post Office — 30 July 2009 Postage stamps and postal history of Gibraltar — 29 July 2009 Herbert Edgar Weston — 27 July 2009 Oswald Marsh — 20 July 2009 Burelage — 30 June 2009 Airmail stamp — 29 June 2009 Fernand Serrane — 28 June 2009 Louis-Henri Mercier (Henri Goegg) — 24 June 2009 Postage stamps and postal history of the German colonies — 23 June 2009 Clive Feigenbaum — 19 June 2009 Henry Bishop — 10 June 2009 Zemstvo stamp — Archive edit   Expanded articles 26 Feb. 2010 Stanley Gibbons – 26 Feb. 2010 Philatelic investment – 31 May. 2009 War tax stamp – 1 Nov. 2008 Postage stamps and postal history of Australia – 26 Oct. 2008 Edward VIII postage stamps – 26 June 2008 Postage stamps and postal history of Mexico – 6 Mar. 2008 Postage stamps and postal history of Armenia – 4 Nov. 2007 Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – 19 Oct. 2007 Yvert et Tellier – 6 Oct. 2007 James A. Mackay – 18 Sept. 2007 Uganda Cowries – 20 Jun. 2007 Postal currency – 16 Jun. 2007 Holiday stamp – 18 May 2007 Postal censorship – 12 May 2007 Pillar box – Archive edit   Other Portals What are portals? · List of portals · Featured portals Purge server cache