January 2019

EXPERTIZING
BY TOM HORN
authentication department director | twhorn@stamps.org
Even Sherlock Holmes Had to Start Somewhere
Here in Pennsylvania, as cold December
gives way to colder January, you’ve been
working on your stamp collection. The chill
wind, snow and darkness outside have
kept you in that nice, warm stamp room
you claimed in a cozy corner of
your home. You found,
or rediscovered,
more than 3,000 entries from “A” (used on Australian Official
stamps) to “Zululand.” The ISWSC also has separate lists at
the same site for stamps with Cyrillic and Greek inscriptions,
and their entire Identifier is downloadable.
Knowing where a stamp is from will get you to the right
place in a worldwide catalog. If it has an odd overprint, surcharge
or other text you still don’t recognize, or you just can’t
find it in the listings, it may be a “back-of the-book issue.”
When you’re really stumped at identifying a stamp, it may not be a postage stamp at
all. These three are all revenue stamps, avidly collected by many and documented in
many books and in journals by the American Revenue Association. But they pay tax, not
postage, which is why you won’t find them in most postage stamp catalogs.
some stamps
that you have
wanted to learn
more about for
years. They look like
they might be valuable. Can
you determine their identities
yourself?
The first thing you need
to know is where the stamp is
from, and what kind of stamp it is.
For single-country specialists this
may sound like child’s play, but those
who collect a wider world know it can be
tougher than you might imagine – especially
for stamps from lands that do not use a familiar
alphabet. Many are shown in color in an
“Illustrated Identifier” section in the back of
each Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue.
Online, there is a very helpful Worldwide
Illustrated Stamp Identifier that identifies
stamps by alphabet and character type, and
even stamps with no characters at all.
Mystic Stamp Co. has an online Foreign
Stamp Identifier, and the International Society
of World Wide Stamp Collectors (ISWSC)
has a World Wide Stamp Identifier with
These special-purpose stamps are called that because many
catalogs list them after the definitive and commemorative
stamps. Semi-postal, airmail, postage due, official and special
delivery stamps are just a few of the many back-of-the-book
categories, which in the Scott catalog earns the stamp a special
prefix; “C” for all airmail stamps, for example.
Finally, if you know what country a stamp is from but
still can’t find it in the book, it may be beyond that catalog
Cinderellas are stamp-like
adhesives that are not actually
stamps at all. This 234-page
catalog of Cinderellas from
Canada alone gives you some
idea of what a broad field they
occupy.
56 AMERICAN PHILATELIST / JANUARY 2019