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

The Penny Penates is a postcard that was posted on 14 July 1840 to Fulham in London. It was addressed to the writer and practical joker Theodore Hook, who was probably also its sender and artist. The hand-painted design on the postcard shows an image of post office clerks sitting around a giant ink well.

The postcard was discovered in 2001 by a stamp dealer while he was examining a stamp collection, and verified by the British Philatelic Association's expert committee as genuine and the world's oldest known postcard. It is also the only known surviving example of a Penny Black stamp, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, used on a postcard. It was sold at auction in 2002 for £31,750 (US$44,300), the most ever paid for a postcard. (Full article...)

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A postage meter or franking machine is a mechanical device used to create and apply physical evidence of postage (or franking) to mailed items. Postage meters are regulated by a country's postal authority. A postage meter imprints an amount of postage, functioning as a postage stamp, a cancellation and a dated postmark all in one. The meter stamp serves as proof of payment and eliminates the need for adhesive stamps. (Full article...)

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Image 1A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
Image 2Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 3Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 4A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 5This 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 6United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875
Image 7A 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 8Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 9Widespread 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 10Cover 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 11A 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 12A 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 13A fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 14A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that in 2007, Arthur Gray's £2 Kangaroo and Map stamp sold for a world record price for a single Australian 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 Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
... that a new Christmas stamp that debuted in the 350-person town of Bethlehem, Georgia, in 1967 got so much attention that the two-employee post office had to hire forty-three temporary workers?
... 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 1The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 2The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 3Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 4The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 5Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 6The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 7The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 8The 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 9Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 10The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 11A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 12First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 13With 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 141834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 15Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 16A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 17A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 18The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 19Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 20The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 21Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 22The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 23Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 24A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 25Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 26A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)

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The Buenos Aires 1859 1p "In Ps" tête-bêche pair, also known as the “In Peso” tête-bêche Pair, is the only known specimen of an inverted error on Barquitos postage stamp issued by the sovereign state of Buenos Aires.

The original plates were constructed of 48 stereotype clichés. At one point, clichés were removed and reaffirmed to the wood base. During this process, one of the clichés was reaffixed upside-down, resulting in the tête-bêche error in position 33 (row 5, stamp 1), which is paired with the correct orientation stamp from position 41 (row 6, stamp 1). This error is different from tête-bêche printing varieties caused by a work-and-turn printing method because cliché errors are true mistakes, while tête-bêche printing varieties are the products of the method. (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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