Stamp Collectors Day

What the day is

Stamp Collectors Day is observed on February 13. Collecting began almost immediately after stamps did, with the first adhesive postage stamp issued in Britain in 1840 and collectors appearing within a couple of decades.

Origin and background

The governing principle of value is counterintuitive to anyone outside the hobby. Beauty counts for very little and error counts for almost everything, because value follows scarcity and errors are scarce by definition. The most celebrated American stamp shows an aeroplane printed upside down, the result of a sheet fed through the press the wrong way in 1918, and a single sheet of one hundred escaped into circulation. Individual examples now sell for sums that would buy a house.

The same logic explains why a mass-produced commemorative issued specifically for collectors is usually worth little. Millions were printed and carefully preserved, so there is no scarcity to create value. The ordinary definitive stamp that everybody used and threw away can be the rarer object.

Condition is the other lever, and it is unforgiving. Centering, the evenness of the margins, and the state of the gum on an unused stamp can change value several times over between two otherwise identical examples. A hinge mark from an old-style album, once completely standard practice, now substantially reduces the price of a mint stamp.

The hobby has aged, and prices for common material have softened considerably as collectors have died and collections come to market, which makes it an unusually cheap thing to start now.

The historical dimension is the underrated part. Stamps record regimes, territorial claims, currencies and countries that no longer exist, and an album of them is a political atlas of the period it covers.

How to take part

• Start with a theme or a country rather than trying to collect everything.
• Use mounts rather than hinges, which permanently reduce value.
• Handle stamps with tongs, since finger oils damage them.
• Look through old family correspondence before buying anything.
• Look up the upside-down aeroplane, which is the hobby's best story.