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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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Benn in 2006

Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as The 2nd Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.

The son of a Liberal and later Labour Party politician, Benn was born in Westminster and privately educated at Westminster School. He was elected for Bristol South East at the 1950 general election but inherited his father's peerage on his death, which prevented him from continuing to serve as an MP. He fought to remain in the House of Commons and campaigned for the ability to renounce the title, a campaign which eventually succeeded with the Peerage Act 1963. He was an active member of the Fabian Society and served as chairman from 1964 to 1965. He served in Harold Wilson's Labour government, first as Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, and later as Minister of Technology. (Full article...)

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Henry Bishopp (1605–1691), also spelt Bishop and Bisshopp, from Henfield in West Sussex, England was a Postmaster General of England and inventor of the first postmark used on mail. He was the second son of Sir Thomas Bishopp, 1st Baronet of Parham also in West Sussex. Henry at first fought for King Charles I, but was reconciled with parliament in 1647, after spending two years in Virginia. In the meantime his Rectory estate in Henfield had been sequestered. However, he was restored to royal favour in 1660 and served as postmaster-general between that date and 1663. At his death in 1692 (N.S.) his Rectory estate in Henfield passed to his great-nephew Sir Cecil Bishopp, 4th Baronet. (Full article...)

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

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 Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
... 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 Argentinian Ricardo D. Eliçabe qualified as a physician, co-founded a petroleum refinery, and wrote about forgeries of Bolivia's first stamps?
... that after the British Army captured New York City in 1776, Samuel Loudon fled to the village of Fishkill, where he founded the state's first post office?

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

Image 1The 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 2The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 3The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 4A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 5Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 6The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 7The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 8The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 9Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 10A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 11Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 12Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 13The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 14Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 15The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 16A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 17A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 18A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 19Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 20The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (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 221834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 23The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 24Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 25First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 26With the growth of urban centres across the Western hemisphere in the 19th century Post Offices were located on main arterial routes (from Postal history)

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The Benjamin Franklin Z Grill, or simply "Z-Grill", is a 1-cent postage stamp issued by the United States Postal Service in February 1868 depicting Benjamin Franklin. While stamps of this design were the common 1-cent stamps of the 1860s, the Z-Grill is distinguished by having the so-called "Z" variety of a grill pressed into the stamp, creating tiny indentations in the paper. Although the 1-cent Franklin Z-Grill is generally cited as the rarest and most valuable of all US postage stamps, the 15-cent Lincoln Z-Grill is just as rare, also with only 2 known to exist. The 10-cent Washington Z-Grill is scarcely less rare with only 6 known to exist. First production runs of Z-Grill process were made of the common Z-grill denominations - the 2-cent Jackson, 3-cent Washington, and 12-cent Washington stamps. The earliest known postmarks of these Z-grill stamps date from January 1868. Then in February 1868 three other denominations were printed with the Z. Grill, the above mentioned 1-cent Franklin, 10-cent Washington and 15-cent Lincoln stamps. These three denominations were only in production for a short period of time with only about 1000 of each being printed before production shifted to the F-grill - resulting in the rarity of these 3 stamps.

The "Z" pattern, unique among grill templates used by the Post Office because it incises horizontal ridges into the stamp rather than vertical ridges, was replaced within a very short time, for stamps with the D- and E-Grills were already being postmarked in mid-February. (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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