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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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Revenue stamps of Malta were first issued in 1899, when the islands were a British colony. From that year to 1912, all revenue issues were postage stamps overprinted accordingly, that was either done locally or by De La Rue in London. Postage stamps also became valid for fiscal use in 1913, so no new revenues were issued until 1926–1930, when a series of key type stamps depicting King George V were issued. These exist unappropriated for use as general-duty revenues, or with additional inscriptions indicating a specific use; Applications, Contracts, Registers or Stocks & Shares. The only other revenues after this series were £1 stamps depicting George VI and Elizabeth II. Postage stamps remained valid for fiscal use until at least the 1980s.

Malta also used impressed duty stamps from the 1920s until these were replaced by pre-printed revenues in the 1970s. The latter were discontinued in the early 1990s. Malta also had specific stamps for Workmen's Compensation (1929–1956), passport fees (1933–1972), National Insurance (1956–1978) and Airport Charge (1975–1988). Excise stamps have been used to pay the tax on cigarettes since the 1930s, the tax on spirits since the 2000s, and the tax on wine since 2015. Excise imprints were also used on cinema, theatre and football match tickets from around the 1950s to the 1980s. (Full article...)

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In philately, errors, freaks, and oddities (EFO) collectively refer to the wide variety of mistakes that may occur during the production of postage stamps.

Postal authorities generally take some care to ensure that mistakes do not get out of the printing plant; to be valid, the EFO stamps must have been sold to a customer. Mistakes smuggled out by employees are called printer's waste, not recognized as legitimate stamps, and may be confiscated from collectors; the Nixon invert is a well-known recent example of an apparent new error that turned out to be simple theft by insiders. The authorities may attempt to lay hands on legitimately sold errors, as happened with the original Inverted Jenny sheet, but usually, collectors are smart enough to hang onto the windfall. (Full article...)

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

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... that Argentinian Ricardo D. Eliçabe qualified as a physician, co-founded a petroleum refinery, and wrote about forgeries of Bolivia's first stamps?
... that Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
... that in 1850, about a quarter of the post offices of the Swiss Post were located in taverns?
... 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 both of Karl R. Free's New Deal-era U.S. post office murals with Native American subjects have been challenged as offensive?
... 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 1First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 2The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 3Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 4The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 5The 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 6A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 7The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 8The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 91834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 10A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 11Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 12Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 13Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 14Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 15The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 16The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 17The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 18The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 19A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 20A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 21Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 22The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 23Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 24Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 25With 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 26A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)

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The Red Mercury—Zinnoberrote Merkur, lit. "vermilion Mercury"—is the rarest of Austrian newspaper stamps. It was issued for the mailing of newspapers in Austria and Lombardy-Venetia. (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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