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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 2009 Royal Mail industrial disputes is an industrial dispute in the United Kingdom involving Royal Mail and members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which began in the summer of 2009. It was the country's first industrial action involving postal workers since 2007 and came about after the Communication Workers Union accused Royal Mail of refusing to enter into dialogue regarding how the implementation of modernisation plans would affect the job security of postal workers.

The strike action began on a local level after postal workers at Royal Mail offices in London and Edinburgh accused their bosses of cutting jobs and services, which they claimed broke the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement, the agreement that was struck to end the 2007 strikes, and accused Royal Mail of threatening modernisation of the service. After a series of localised walkouts over the summer months, and after failing to reach an agreement, the CWU opened a national ballot for industrial action in September 2009. (Full article...)

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Ralph Allen (c. 1693 – 29 June 1764) was a British postmaster, merchant and philanthropist best known for his reforms to Britain's postal system. Born in St Columb Major, Cornwall, he moved to Bath, Somerset to work in the municipal post office, becoming its postmaster by 1712. Allen made the system more efficient and took over contracts for the British mail service to cover areas of England up to the Anglo-Scottish border and into South Wales.

He purchased local stone mines from his postal profits and had Prior Park built as his country house to show off the versatility of Bath stone, using the old post office as his townhouse. Working alongside architect John Wood, the Elder, the stone Allen mined was heavily used in construction work for development works in Bath. However, the mines did not consistently make a profit and he subsidised them from his postal profits. (Full article...)

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

Did you know (auto-generated)

... that after Irish post office clerk Maureen Flavin Sweeney reported worsening weather conditions, Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to postpone D-Day by 24 hours?
... 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 Argentinian Ricardo D. Eliçabe qualified as a physician, co-founded a petroleum refinery, and wrote about forgeries of Bolivia's first stamps?
... 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 in 2007, Arthur Gray's £2 Kangaroo and Map stamp sold for a world record price for a single Australian stamp?

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

Image 1A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 2The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 3A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 4Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 5A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 6The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 7The 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 8The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 9Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 10Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 11The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 12The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 13First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 14Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 15The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 16Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 17The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 18A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 191834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 20With 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 21The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 22Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 23A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)
Image 24The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 25Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 26Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)

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The Inverted Swan, a 4-pence blue postage stamp issued in 1855 by Western Australia, was one of the world's first invert errors. Technically, it is the frame that is inverted, not the image of the swan, but it has become commonly known as the Inverted Swan.

In 1854, Western Australia issued its first stamps, featuring the colony's symbol, the black swan, as did all WA stamps until 1902. While the 1d black was engraved in Great Britain by Perkins Bacon, other values, including the 4d blue, were produced by Horace Samson in Perth using lithography, and with different frames around the swan design for each value. (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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