US Stamp Collections

Creating a collection of U.S. postage stamps need not be an encyclopedic, lifelong pursuit. One could choose to collect stamps that only bear portraits of baseball players or movie stars, images of airplanes or automobiles, or destinations such as national parks. Some people like to collect stamps whose subjects are historical events such as World War II, while others prefer to build collections based on the characteristics of the stamps themselves, such as stamps with fancy cancels or those lacking perforations, such as the imperforate stamps issued between 1907 and 1927 on coils, which were designed for stamp-vending-machine companies like Mailometer and U.S. Automatic Vending, whose machines perforated the stamps as they were dispensed. A natural place to begin would be with the country’s first official stamps, which were issued in 1847. Those stamps depicted Benjamin Franklin (5 cents) and George Washington (10 cents). Nineteenth-century U.S. stamps include those printed during the Civil War by both the Union and the Confederate States of America (CSA). Of those latter stamps, the first CSA stamp was issued on October 16, 1861, and featured a portrait of Jefferson Davis. Nine million of these nickel stamps were printed by a Richmond, Virginia, company called Hoyer & Ludwig, which, a month later, also printed almost 1.5-million 10-cent stamps featuring the visage of former president Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves and was claimed as a southerner by the CSA. A collection can also be built from the 1875 re-printing of the nation’s earliest stamps, which were issued precisely for stamp collectors. Some collections of 19th-century U.S. stamps gravitate to cancelled stamps as many of the cancellations from this era are quite weird and wonderful. So-called fancy cancels were handmade from cork, and their position on a stamp to prevent reuse varied wildly. Some collectors gravitate to lightly cancelled stamps, which are barely covered by the cancellation, while others covet bulls-eye cancellations showing the time, date, and location of the cancellation, as well as the stars, skulls, and moons that were sometimes used for cancellation imagery. By the early 20th century, a stars-and-stripes cancel mark was becoming more common thanks to the advent of automatic postmarking machines—though the stars were ultimately dropped from the cancel design, wavy flag lines can still be found on modern cancellations. Smaller thematic collections include the 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, and 10 cent stamps issued on May 1, 1901, to promote the Pan American Exposition and World's Fair in Buffalo, New York. A similar early series, from 1904, was issued to promote the St. Louis World’s Fair, which celebrated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase—the 10-cent stamp in this series showed the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase overlaid on a map of the United States. The first airmail stamps from 1918 are also prized because a sheet of 24-cent stamps from the first release was issued with an upside down Curtiss Jenny biplane on its front. The Graf Zeppelins stamps of 1930 came in 65-cent, $1.30, and $2.60 denominations, and the 10 National Parks stamps of 1934 were issued in denominations from a penny to a dime. The same year as the National Park stamps, another noteworthy series arrived, the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps, or duck stamps, which were purchased by hunters of migratory waterfowl. Intended as revenue stamps and meant to be signed by the hunters who purchased them, these stamps were naturally popular among conservationists and those who admired wildlife art—subsequent sales generated enough revenue for the government to purchase millions of acres that were added to the National Wildlife Refuge System. Artists included Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling, as well as artists Frank Benson, Maynard Reece, and Walter Weber.