A History of Stamp Collecting

Collecting stamp is one of the world's oldest hobbies and one of its most popular. Back when it was just gaining steam, only children used to collect stamps. Adults thought of stamp collecting as a nothing more than child's play. However, as time passed, those children grew up, but they continued their fascination with stamp collecting and became the world's first philatelists. The pull of a great stamp collection is still felt by many people around the world. But, as with all endeavours, you should learn the history and the importance of the king of all hobbies, stamp collecting.

Many people, including some who have been gathering postage symbols for years think that gathering stamps was started with the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black, which was issued in Great Britain during the year 1840. While this was a momentous occasion in the history of stamp collecting, it overshadows the fact that the world of stamp collecting includes not just postage stamps, but tax stamps, charity stamps, etc. One needs to go back all the way to the year 1624, when the Dutch introduced tax stamps. They were discontinued when more efficient methods were discovered. Impress your friends with this fact.

Generally though, when people are talking about collecting stamps, they are talking about postage stamp collecting, which began with the Penny Black and the Penny blue. The idea behind it was put forth by Sir Rowland Hill, who came up with the brilliant idea of making the sender pay for sending the mail instead of the receiver by buying these postage stamps and placing them on the envelope. In other words, he made postage, a pre paid system. Imagine getting a mail from someone you don't know and having to pay to read it, it would have been frustrating to find out that it's just a chain or spam mail. Soon, many other countries started adopting this method. The United States issued its first postage stamp in 1847.

By the end of the 19th century, the said hobby became extremely popular and trading became a very lucrative business prospect. By this time, specialised tools like albums, tongs, magnifiers, etc became readily available to collectors.

In 1891, the Universal Postal Union was created. The effect of this was profound, as they decided to adopt a standard of colours that would signify particular international postal rates. This caused a flurry of new postage impressions being printed worldwide to conform to these new regulations.

Stamp collecting continued to gain momentum in the 20th century, with 1940 being described as the pinnacle of the golden era of stamp amassing, with the US president, F.D Roosevelt being a prominent stamp collector.

These days, stamp gathering has decreased in importance. However, none the less, postage seal collecting is still a very wonderful hobby that should and can be pursued by anyone, regardless of age or gender.

Alec Beaufort is into stamp collecting for over 40 years now. Collecting postage stamps is a hobby that his grandfather introduced to him when he was only 9 years old.

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