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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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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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Keystone B-6 twin-engine air mail plane of the US Army Air Corps in snow storm

The Air Mail scandal, also known as the Air Mail fiasco, is the name that the American press gave to the political scandal resulting from a 1934 congressional investigation into the awarding of contracts to certain airlines to carry airmail and the subsequent disastrous use of the U.S. Army Air Corps (USAAC) to fly the mail after the contracts were revoked.

During the administration of U.S. President Herbert Hoover, Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1930. Using its provisions, Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown held a meeting with the executives of the top airlines, later dubbed the "Spoils Conference", in which the airlines effectively divided among themselves the air mail routes. Acting on those agreements, Brown awarded contracts to the participants through a process that effectively prevented smaller carriers from bidding, resulting in a Senate investigation. (Full article...)

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Image 1A fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 2Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 3A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
Image 4Cover 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 5Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 6Widespread 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 7A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
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 10A 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 11A 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 12Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 13This 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 14A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that both of Karl R. Free's New Deal-era U.S. post office murals with Native American subjects have been challenged as offensive?
... that Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
... 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"?
... that James Diossa rescued the only public library and post office in Central Falls, Rhode Island, when the city went into bankruptcy?
... that working at a post office was how Derrick Harden became an NFL player?
... that after Irish post office clerk Maureen Flavin Sweeney reported worsening weather conditions, Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to postpone D-Day by 24 hours?

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

Image 1Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 2First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 3A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 4Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 5The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 6Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 7With 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 8Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 9A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 10A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 11Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 12The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 13The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 14The 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 151834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 16The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 17The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 18A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 19The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 20The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 21Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 22A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 23The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 24Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 25The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 26Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)

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The block of four "Small One Dollar" stamps is the crown jewel of Red Revenues

The Red Revenues (Chinese: 紅印花郵票) are Qing dynasty Chinese revenue stamps that were overprinted (surcharged) to be used as postage stamps in 1897. Their limited number, fine design and the intaglio process made the stamps in this series some of the most sought-after in the world.

There are several varieties of Red Revenue stamps, with the "Small One Dollar" being the rarest and most valuable. It has been called "China's rarest regularly issued stamp". In a 2013 Hong Kong auction, a single stamp was sold for HK$6.9 million. Another was sold in a 2013 Beijing auction for 7.22 million yuan. A block of four, considered the "crown jewel" of Chinese philately, was reportedly sold in 2009, together with a different stamp, for 120 million yuan (US$18.8 million). (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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