European Stamp Prices & News
Europe stamp news, pictures, and stamp auction information
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• See interesting and strange stories from the world of stamp collecting.
• Get info and pictures about new stamp issues in or related to European countries and regions.
• Sellers and buyers (in "All articles"): See what stamps are actually selling for on eBay's huge stamp marketplace.
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One fun approach to take to starting a stamp collection for new parents is to celebrate the year that your child was born by collecting at least one stamp from each country in the world from that year. This would take some time to complete, and would be an interesting way to commemorate your child’s birth year.
If you have the means and the time, you could put a big dent in this project pretty quickly, and it wouldn’t cost too much. (Look through the listings on this site for each country, and type in the year in the search box; most shouldn’t cost too much since they’re so new.) If you want to space it out over months or even years, you can include your child in the process when he or she is old enough. It’s a good bonding experience, it’s educational, and it’s fun.
If you choose to collect from every country in the world, you can start with all the countries in Europe (that’s what our menu is), then move onto Asian stamps and African stamps on sites like http://www.asian-stamps.com and http://www.africa-stamps.com, etc. This would assure you cover all the UN-recognized countries as they are now.
Or you could narrow the scope of the collection to a more localized, meaningful area. If you live in Germany, you could get one of each German 2008 stamp. Or one stamp from every country in the world where German is an official language.
You can set it up however you want. Choose your approach, and what you think would be most fun and interesting for your son or daughter when older. Then take a look around and see what you can find for that year. Have fun!
Note: The stamps pictured in this article are a 2008 Harry Potter stamp from Albania, and a stamp featuring children’s “folk costumes” from Serbia from the same year. In case you want to get meta about your child’s stamp collection and want to have stamps actually related to children! These were found on eBay for $39 and $2.45 respectively.
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As we wrote about last March, rare and collectible postage stamps tend to retain their value, even through times of serious economic hardship when stock markets and investments plummet.
With the recent financial crises dominating the fearsome headlines in American (and world) financial news outlets, many are facing an increasingly more opaque reality of economic hardship that has been materializing for months. But if you have any rare stamps or other valuable collectibles, hang on to them! They may be the only thing you own that is worth anything soon.
Although the terms fake, forgery, and counterfeit are often used interchangeably, they technically refer to rather different concepts in the world of philately. When trying to avoid them while collecting (or while trying to concentrate on collecting only stamps of this kind) it is useful to keep them separate.
Forgeries
These are stamps that are created for the purpose of deceiving collectors, i.e. for making money from tricking a buyer into thinking that the stamp is in fact a legitimately produced collectible. This type of phony stamp has been around since about 1860, only twenty years after postage stamps in the modern sense were invented.
Fakes
This refers to a legitimate stamp that has been altered in some way to make it appear to be of a more valuable type. This could be altering the overprint, the cancellation, the colors, details of the design, or even the perforation.
Counterfeits
This is a copy of a legitimate stamp made to fool authorities; i.e., to be used to actually send a parcel.
The waters of phony stamp identification are muddied considerably not only by people using these terms interchangeably, but by the question of what constitutes a legitimate stamp in the first place, and by the fact that governments have occasionally issued their own phony-baloney and propaganda stamps.
For example, Great Britain released counterfeits of its own stamp into circulation in 1856 to test its own security features. Also, during times of war governments have made counterfeits of their enemies’ stamps, either to deprive the enemy of postal revenue, or (altering details on the stamp) to demoralize the enemy.
Examples of such stamps are stamps that Germany created in the 1930s that were copies of Britain’s Silver Jubilee stamps, but with the Jewish Star of David etched into the background, and the legend changed to boldly read “THIS WAR IS A JEWISH WAR”; and American-made “German” stamps from 1944 changing “Deutsches Reich” to “Futsches Reich” (”the Reich is gone”) and adding cadaverous facial features to stamps showing Adolf Hitler. (It must be said that the workmanship on the German stamp outdoes the American one.)
To further confuse matters, many counterfeits and forgeries, being highly collectible, have themselves been forged. The stamps of the infamous Jean de Sperati, an Italian stamp forger, are so famous that they are often worth more than the original stamps he was forging.
There are other categories of wholly or partially not-real stamps, such as bogus stamps, which are stamps that copy the general look of an issuing body’s stamps, but are in fact original (and illegitimate) designs. These bogus stamps have also been forged, of course.
These categories can be very interesting and exciting niches to collect, but caution must be exercised when obtaining such issues. Who knows how many levels of phoniness the stamp you buy is buried under!