I must’ve enjoyed it because my Grandad wanted me to have his old postage stamps. When he died my nan told me that he wanted me to have them. I didn’t really understand the significance of that at the time and that is something that I regret. If I had taken an interest sooner then I could have expanded it much further.

But that is in the past now and since realising my mistake my Nan has let me keep the collection in my bedroom. It is under my bed. I know that is not the best place for it because it cant be seen all of the time but at least it is safe.

This website is an avenue I’m taking to display my Grandad’s old postage stamps. I will still refer to them as my Grandad’s stamps because to me that is what they are. I will add to them but even then as a collection it will be in 2 very distinct parts.

I have decide that I am going to create a tradition in my family , I will add at least one album to the collection and pass that album onto the next member. It the is the responsibility on the person I pass it onto to add a further album at least.

It doesn’t matter what form that they add it the only thing that matters is that they contribute.

I am really looking forward to that and feel a great sense of responsibility to carry on where my granddad left off. I know that I don’t have the same passion for old postage stamps as he did but but I will do my best to make him proud.

He collected a wide variety of stamps and but most came from the UK. He had multiple albums, some like (I hate to compare them to this) but like my old football sticker albums where there is a blank sheet in a ring binder where the stamps that you have collected had a specific place.

I guess this is traditional postage stamp collecting. There are also a number of presentation packs, miniature sheets but I think his true passion was first day covers as he has many albums full.

It is fascinating to me as he must’ve been so passionate about his hobby. I am also jealous in a way that I am not that passionate about my hobbies. This is something I want to rectify and maybe this as well as making me me feel closer to my Grandad will help me do that.

The first thing that I am going to do is do some cataloguing of the stamps that the had. That will take me a while because he has so many old postage stamps.

I am also not sure of the best way of doing it. I thought the easiest way was buying a stamp book from Amazon and ticking off the stamps that he has. I am hoping that this will be quite fun and it will allow me to see he full collection in detail.

I also want to do my bit by adding to the collection. I think I know how I will start. I will start be ordering first day covers. I will talk more abut these in a further post.

I want to not only use this as an opportunity to expand his collection but use it at the same time to tell a story of our family. I want to this to be about the whole family so I want to use the stamps to capture that most important events that affect our family. I just think that this will be an amazing thing to inherit in the future. I can imagine how I would feel to be given a stamp collection that had start 400 years ago in my family and the entries told a story of my family. How cool would that be? It would be amazing and I m excited to be a part of creating that.

I also want to stamp a bit of my own personality on the collection. It is obvious that my Grandad was a massive fan of old postage stamps relating to Christmas. I have spoke to my mom and nam about that and he loved Christmas.

I will be looking around to find other areas that I like that will be a great addition.

Although the idea of old postage stamps on their own doesn’t excite me, being part of the tradition does and I have to admit that the more I look at the old postage stamps the more I appreciate their beauty and can really understand how my Grandad became so passionate about this.

Very old stamp catalogue about British Colonial Stamps in great condition.

Another old stamp book

The book I used to catalogue the my Grandad’s collection.

Here are some of the first day covers.

If we start off by looking at supply. What factors affect supply? Well the age of the old postage stamps usually makes a difference. The older the old postage stamps are there are less likely to be many of them around any more. Lots may have been around and produced at the time but many have not survived until today.

What makes older old postage stamps even rarer? A high face value does. Stamps in normal circulation are generally inexpensive. In the past though there were stamps of high value relative to the average wage. In some instances old postage stamps in circulation had the face value of some peoples’ weekly wage. As you can imagine there weren’t many people who bought these so there are few survivors.

So limited supply adds to the Value Of Old Postage Stamps but what are there any other ways that supply is limited? Well there have been a number of occasions where old postage stamps have had errors on them.

If you imagine, this would be hugely embarrassing for the post office so usually as soon as it was noticed, which was usually pretty early on, the old postage stamps were removed from printing and disappeared from circulation. This means that often errors are pretty rare and this scarcity adds to their values.

So if we look at demand what influences that? Well over recent years it has become fashionable to invest in alternative investments like wine and antiques. Stamps have also seen an additional interest and there has been an increased in the overall demand for Old Postage Stamps.

Special occasions like a royal wedding are often in demand. Old postage stamps relating to these occasions actually don’t usually hold much value. So why is the value of Old Postage Stamps for events like these so low when the demand is high? Well the post office in anticipation of high demand usually has a vast supply. It is high demand relative to supply that adds value.

We saw that there are a few errors and that influences supply but there is also a demand for errors because most collectors would like to own old postage stamps with an error on.

If we look at First Day Covers, the Royal Mail usually print many for the day of issue. This means that if you have a First Day Cover with stamped with the standard stamp then they aren’t likely to be valued much. If you have First Day Covers which have an unusual cancellation stamp then they are likely to be valued more because of the limited supply.

So what other factors affect the value of old postage stamps? The condition – the better the condition the higher value. You should always take care to appropriately hold your old postage stamps. More tips about this will follow in another post.

Whether the old postage stamps have been used will also affect the value. Some old postage stamps that have been used can attract a higher price than those that haven’t been used.

Complete sets are obviously worth more than those that are incomplete but you also pay a premium for you complete old postage stamp collections.

If you have any old postage stamps and want to know the value, why not check them out on Ebay to see if someone is trying to sell something similar. This will give you an idea of the value of old postage stamps.

Having said that I would like to add value to the collection, I guess that is human nature, I want a bargain. So to do that I will have to look at the value of old postage stamps. I am not sure how hard that will be and will spend some time looking at Ebay to see what I can find out. I also hope that my book about Old Postage Stamps will also help with that.

How do I plan to take this website forward? Well I want to put some examples of my Grandad’s old postage stamps collection on here. I also plan to interview my Nan about it to try (can’t wait to see my Nan on the internet). I’m hoping that this will help me understand his passion which should help me add to it.

I have said it before but I am jealous about my Grandad’s passion about old postage stamps. I wish that I was passionate about something as he was. The more that I look at his collection the more I am beginning to understand it. I hope that I will be able to do his passion and his memory proud.

I am going to put together a questionnaire to ask my Nan questions. If you have any suggestions then please let me know. I have also ordered an old postage stamps book from Amazon. More about that next time…

I love the latest issue ‘London 2010 Festival of Stamps’. Rather than buying a first day cover this time I have bought…

The King’s Stamps Prestige Stamp Book

The King’s Stamps Miniature Sheet

Accession of King George V Miniature Sheet

I was quite disappointed that I missed out on the mammals issue so to make up for that I bought…

Mammals Stamp Set

And while searching I came across the…

Europe Retail Stamp Book

Worldwide Retail Stamp Book

So I decided to ad these to the basket and I bought those too. Thought I may as well spread the £1.45 delivery charge over as many stamps as I could!

My sister is moving house and getting married next month so that must mean a new first day cover is due… one with a new name and address on. My plan of the postage stamp collection recording the family history is really working.

I will post pics of the merchandise when it is received and I will keep you updated on future purchases.

Edit: I just after posting this post I picked up my Old Postage Stamp book/catalogue and started going through to pick out all the castle stamps.

I guess this is my wish list. I haven’t been through them all yet but will hopefully post the list in its entirety shortly.

Until next time

At first I wanted to leave them in the sleeve. It seemed like the easy option. I haven’t damaged them after all…they were like that when I got them. I instantly knew that was the wrong decision. Like anything in life I knew that I had to take action.

I gave some of the First Day Covers a hard tug to get them out. The old postage stamps on these were obviously damaged.

The damage appears to be on the silhouette of the queen. Obviously this disappointed me but think I took the right decision. At least I think so.

They were obviously damaged in the sleeve. There was no way they could be removed without part of the silhouette remaining attached to the sleeve. I believe that I have help saved these ones even if now they are not in the best of conditions.

I ordered the First Day Covers on the top of the bed once I had all of them out of the album. The first thing that struck me was how colourful they were. This is something that you don’t really appreciate when they are stored away in the sleeve of the album. These old postage stamps in these albums of 30 to 40 years old but are still so vibrant…still full of life…still how my Grandad left them.

With all of the old postage stamps out on the bed it really is an amazing sight. I left them on the bed over night to make sure that they received a good airing.

I have taken photos of each one and recorded a video. I will be posting the videos on my You Tube channel and on this site. After recording the first video I decided to cover up the addresses on the First Day Covers. You can’t be too careful of identity theft!

Then came the more difficult task of putting them back into the sleeves. I couldn’t believe the sleeve sizes against the size of some of the First Day Covers. They were official Royal Mail First Day Covers and official Royal Mail First Day Cover albums.

Why was it such as struggle to fit them in?!

I was very careful not to damage the Old Postage Stamps. I made sure I took my time. Luckily I am a patient person and I was quite happy knowing I was doing it properly.

I even was able ‘fix’ some of the damaged ones. Well… not fix as such, perhaps a better word would be ‘improved’.

Some of the Old Postage Stamps had become slightly folded in the sleeves and I was able to put them back in flat. I was very proud of this.

There are 4 first day covers to go through. I will then move on to the other albums once the 4 have been completed. I will post the videos soon.

This was a fun exercise because it gave me a chance to go through his collection stamp by stamp.

So the book that I have is the British Stamp Market Values 2009. The reason that I chose that one over the Stanley Gibbons book was because of the reviews on Amazon. The reviews tended to say that the British Stamp Market Values gave a more realistic Value Of Old Postage Stamps.

I’ve actually done a quick video about the book which I have posted on You Tube and hope to link it to this blog post (hope it worked. It took me and my girlfriend a few evening to complete the cataloguing. It was really interesting. Not all the stamps were in the book but most of them were.

A whole collection about kings and queens wasn’t in there. I think that it must have been a special edition. I will have to do some more investigating into those. The book that I bought was for British Old Postage Stamps so obviously his stamps from abroad were not in the book.

There were some really interesting Old Postage Stamps in the book and I will go into some of these in more detail in further posts.

I marked off each of the stamps in the book by circling them with my pen. This will become a record of where the old postage stamp collection was at the point that I inherited it (plus the others that I that I couldn’t find).

I also found 2 other books in the my Grandad’s collection. One similar to mine where he must’ve marked off his old postage stamps. This on was called ‘Collect British Stamps’ and it was published by Stanley Gibbons. It was from 1980, the year I was born.

The other book looks like a special book. It is the ‘price list of British Colonial Stamps and Foreign Sets’ from J.E. Lee. The book actually doesn’t look as old as the Stanley Gibbons one but when I looked at the ‘newest’ old postage stamps in there it was dated at 1948. This probably means that this book was around from approximately 1949. It is really good condition.

I have made further videos about these 2 books which I have posted on You Tube. I will do my best to link them to my old postage stamps blog so they so automatically but if not I will post the links here.

Please can you let me know if you would like me to post photos or videos of my Grandad’s old postage stamp collection on this site?

There has been a postal service around, in variety of forms, for hundreds of years but the first postage stamp wasn’t first used until 1840.

Incidentally if you are interested in postal history I urge you to read about the postal service that Genghis Khan introduced to the Mongolian Empire. His postal routes stretched his entire Empire and that Empire reached about 5,000 miles. Impressive stuff…

Back the British old postages stamps…

So the fist stamps were introduced in 1840. Apparently it was to help solve the financial issues of the post office. Well that doesn’t seem to have been particularly successful as our post offices are still making losses to this day and the government is always seeking ways to privatise an element of it.

The first postage stamp was the ‘Penny Black’ probably the most well known stamp around the world. At the time this was worth one old British penny, i.e. before Britain went metric.

The stamp was very simple in nature with a portrait of Queen Victoria and the words ‘Postage’ and ‘One Penny’. Nowhere did it say Britain and there only a few instances the British old postage stamps have actually used the word British or Britain.

The stamp was black and this caused a problem. The colour of the cancellation marks were also black which meant it was difficult to see it on the stamp and the cunning individual may be able to reuse. (Even to this day it appears that the post office struggle with cancellation marks and often miss them completely!)

Well the black stamp changed colour to red in 1841 and was appropriately called Penny Reds.

Over the years of the Victorian reign in British Old Postage Stamps became successful very quickly and stamps for more denominations appeared.

The wording on the stamps changed from ‘Postage’ to ‘Postage and Inland Revenue’ to ‘Postage & Revenue’ to ‘Postage Revenue’.

When Queen Victoria died and Edward the VII came to the thrown, the stamps had to be changed to show his portrait and soon after they were changed again to George VI (The farther of Queen Elizabeth II).

It was in 1940 that a century of old postage stamps was celebrated with six stamps of George VI and Queen Victoria both appearing on them side by side.

The war then brought about a further change to the old postage stamps. Hard times meant there was less ink around to be used for the stamps. Less ink meant that paler stamps were issued.

When Queen Elizabeth II came to power in 1952 the stamps were changed again. It was during her reign in 1967 the first Machins were issued. My Grandad has a lot of Machins in his collection.

From the 1950s onwards creativity reigned in British stamps as more commemorative stamps were issued and we moved away from stamps that just featured the portrait the monarch.

While the stamps now may not have the portrait of the Queen on, they will show a silhouette of her in the corner.

Old Postage Stamps have had a fascinating history and it is not surprising that it led to the rise of the stamp collector. I want to learn about the history of stamps to help me in my pursuit of learning about my Grandad’s passion and his collection.

I would like to hear about the history of stamps from other countries so please post your comments.

So now I will move to researching the history of the stamp collector…