Philately

Abstract: Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called 'Arab Dhow'. It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, 'This is what is most striking about this place'. Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. Whenever I saw them tied up at the waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to our region, quaint, something the foreigner would remark on, something not quite modern, and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed in our own modern docks.' The speaker is an East Indian merchant in one of V.S. Naipaul's novels. Numismatics has long been recognized not only as a hobby and an investment but also as a scholarly discipline of considerable value to the general historian. Philately, in contrast, has never been regarded as a scholarly discipline. Philatelists spend hours cataloguing minor printing variations on particular issues, talk mostly to each other, and publish in stamp magazines that are not indexed in the Readers Guide, Historical Abstracts or Social Sciences Index. Most historians have a bias in favour of written documents. Except for art historians they tend to dismiss visual evidence of the type that stamps might provide as mere 'illustrations' of points already made on the basis of written sources. This is unfortunate, for stamps are excellent primary sources for the symbolic messages which governments seek to convey to their citizens and to the world. But after all, it might be objected, postage stamps are unimportant because they are all but invisible. Few people can describe the

Abstract: This paper uses stamp catalogue prices to investigate the returns on British collectible postage stamps over the period 1900–2008. We find an annualized return on stamps of 7.0% in nominal terms, or 2.9% in real terms. These returns are higher than those on bonds but below those on equities. The volatility of stamp prices approaches that of equities. Stamp returns are impacted by movements in the equity market, but the systematic risk of stamps remains low. Stamps partially hedge against unanticipated inflation. Estimates of average after-cost returns for individual investors show that stamps may rival equities in terms of realized performance.

Abstract: A sheet of (preferably twenty) personalized postage stamps may, be applied to pieces of mail or given as a gift to loved ones. Each individual stamp will include the country of issue (e.g. U.S.A.) and a monetary value (e.g. 33¢ or 55¢). The sheet of personalized stamps may contain a seal showing collectability value or proof of authentication. There is a method of retrieving an the personalized image and sizing the image before it is copied or printed onto the appropriate areas of the stamp sheet. The consumer may request the operator of the computer system to apply a protective coating to protective the life of the stamp. In addition, the consumer may request that the finished product be framed as a picture.