Another area in which United States philately differs from nearly all the rest of the world is in our Official Stamps. In 1873 the Post Office issued a series of stamps for the various government agencies that used stamps.
Because of its familiarity to most American philatelists, we tend not to appreciate just how difficult collecting United States stamps is compared to collecting the stamps of most other countries.
The issuance of postage stamps was one of the great technological and commercial innovations of the nineteenth century.
At the White House on May 8, the US Postal Service revealed the artwork of a commemorative Forever stamp to celebrate the centennial year of former first lady Barbara Bush’s birth.
There is no more appropriate stamp design than the portrait of Hermes, the messenger god in his winged helmet, on the first stamps of Greece.
On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established a postal system for the United Colonies and appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster general.
Check letters are simple a way of indicating where in the sheet a stamp was printed.
Despite the unpopularity of its first commemorative set, the Columbian Exposition issue of 1893, the United States Post Office commemorated the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition with their own set of commemorative stamps in 1898.
The Columbian Exposition set of 1893 (Scott #230-245) was the world’s first commemorative set and it has become one of the most popular sets not only in United States philately but in the world. But this was not always so.
