The Popularity of Postage Stamp Collecting

You are possibly wondering “Why people collect postage stamp. First, British kids found gathering as a fun game, since the price of the stamps and had nice, vivid images on them. These days numerous people are prompted to to gather postage stamps either because a relative passed the tradition or purchased them a souvenir sheet of stamps.

In 1840, Britain brought in the “Penny Black” as the first sticky postage stamp. When this happened, they didn’t realize that this would set off a postage stamp gathering, a Timbromania among the young ones. As these young hobbyists aged, they proudly given their stamp collections down to the next generation, so a real market was created.

The United States got “infected” with this Timbromania in the year 1930, as the first souvenir sheet was published. During the great depression, numerous stamps were burned, as few families could afford a postage stamp catalog, since the price of one could cover the costs for food for one week for a family of four.

The postage stamps with typographical errors became the most wanted in the world of postage stamp collectors. Most serious collectors were trying to seek rare stamps resulting from a printing error. For example, the “Inverted Jenny” is a United States postage stamp from 1918 holding a photo of a airplane that was mistakenly printed upside-down. Only one hundred of these were ever published and a pack of four were been sold for $2.7 Million! The US-made “Benjamin Franklin Z Grill” ones were made with a waffle design mounted into the paper supposedly to keep the ink from leaking. Only 2 of them were published before they realized that the procedure was impractical. Nowadays, one of those could worth about $3 Million.

Internationally, gathering postage stamps usually equals with big money. For instance, the “Treskilling Yellow” from Sweden was misprinted with the wrong color, ranking it’s value at over $2 Million and the Britain’s “Penny Black” has been sold for $200 in the year 2000, and unused reached the price $3000. How it would be of you would own the “British Guiana Magneta”, a very special and rare stamp with a face value of one single cent, but the estimated value of $940,000! Since there is one copy in existence, there are rumors that it was another altered 4-cent copy. Yet, these claims were confuted. Other speculate that another replica was found but was purchased by Arthur Hind, who held the original and who secretly burned the copy so it’s copy would’t lose the value. In 1999 a false copy was found in Bremen, Germany.

All in all, the postage stamp collecting is a entertaining and kind of inexpensive way to collect old artwork.