Before stamps, the receiver paid
Until 1840, British letters were usually paid for by the person receiving them, and the price depended on distance and on the number of sheets of paper. It was expensive and complicated, and people found ways round it — some sent coded marks on the outside of a letter, read them, and refused to pay for delivery.
Rowland Hill proposed a simple fix: one low price for any letter within the country, paid in advance by the sender, shown by a small sticky label. The PENNY Black, the first adhesive POSTAGE STAMP, went on sale on 1 May 1840, with a portrait of the young Queen Victoria. Letter-writing boomed. Our Victorians page covers the age it belonged to.
Britain's stamps do not say Britain
Because Britain issued the first stamps, it never needed to print its name on them, and it still does not. British stamps are the only ones in the world without the name of the COUNTRY; a profile of the reigning monarch's head stands in for it. Every other country's stamps carry a name.
Early sheets had no holes between the stamps, and clerks cut them apart with scissors. PERFORATION, the rows of little holes that let stamps be torn off neatly, came to Britain in 1854. The frilly edges are one of the things collectors check, and the number of holes per two centimetres is measured with a gauge.
Philately and its vocabulary
PHILATELY, the proper name for stamp collecting, was invented in 1864 by a French collector, Georges Herpin, from Greek words meaning love and freedom from tax, since a stamp showed the postage had been paid. A MINT stamp is unused, with its gum intact. A used one carries a POSTMARK or CANCEL mark, inked on so it cannot be reused. To FRANK a letter is to mark it as paid.
Collectors handle stamps with flat-ended TWEEZERS, because oils from fingers can damage them, and mount them in an ALBUM with a small folded paper HINGE or a clear mount. A CATALOGUE lists every ISSUE a country has produced, and many collections follow a theme — animals, space, sport — rather than a country. The plain profile of Queen Elizabeth the Second designed by Arnold Machin in 1967 was printed on British stamps so many times that it is thought to be one of the most reproduced images ever made.
The most valuable stamp in the world
The British Guiana one-cent magenta was printed locally in 1856 when a shipment of stamps failed to arrive, and only one copy is known to survive. A schoolboy in British Guiana found it among family papers in 1873 and sold it for a few shillings. In 2021 it sold at auction for more than eight million dollars. Printing mistakes are prized too: the Inverted Jenny, a 1918 American stamp printed with its aeroplane upside down, is famous for the same reason.
Most stamps fetch very little, and a COLLECTION is rarely an investment. The pleasure is in the DESIGN — a tiny picture of history, wildlife or art — in completing a SERIES from a SHEET, in finding something RARE, and in a VINTAGE ENVELOPE that has travelled halfway around the world.