The Philosateleian adds revenue stamp album pages

The 15th anniversary of the launch of The Philosateleian U.S. Stamp Album is coming up next year. I can hardly belive that I’ve been creating stamp album pages for that long, but I’m pleased to announce a significant expansion to my project: beginning today, The Philosateleian now includes free pages for United States revenue stamps!

While it’s true that I’ve offered pages for hunting permit or “duck” stamps for the past decade, this is the first time I’ve tackled pages for any other revenue or fiscal stamps. You can download and print Volume RI at your convenience, but I also wanted to go into a bit more detail on my approach to creating these pages.

What they are

This initial release includes pages for general revenues of 1862–1963, plus revamped pages for hunting permit stamps, which I’m relocating from Volume IX (back of book) to Volume RI. I think it’s fair to say that my general revenue album pages will be most useful for casual or intermediate United States revenue stamp collectors. Advanced collectors may find the pages lacking for reasons I will detail shortly.

My hope is to add pages for revenue stamps in other categories as time permits, but considering the many different categories of revenues, I didn’t want to hold back this initial batch until I had reached some arbitrary point of completion.

On that note, if there are revenue categories for which you would be particularly interested in seeing album pages, please let me know. I’m not making any promises, but I’m certainly willing to take your suggestions into consideration.

What they are not

As I mentioned earlier, advanced collectors may find my general revenue album pages to be unsatisfactory due to a couple of decisions I made during the design process.

First, the revenue stamps of 1861–71 were issued in several different formats: fully perforated, part perforate, and imperforate, the latter two formats resulting from the need to get stamps out the door as quickly as possible. In most cases, the part perforate and imperforate stamps are valued at significantly more than their fully perforated counterparts, and for this particular series, I’ve opted to include spaces only for each face- and color-different variety, not for perforation varieties.

That does not mean I won’t consider creating pages for the part perforate and imperforate varieties if there is sufficient demand, so again, if this is something you would like to see, please contact me.

Second, I’ve chosen to omit spaces for varieties with handstamped overprints. Although many of these have been assigned major catalogue numbers, they are also arguably particularly subject to being forged. Those varieties are generally moderately to very expensive stamps so I doubt this will cause consternation, but I am of course open to changing my mind if there is sufficient demand.

Summary

The Philosateleian’s new revenue stamp album pages are probably most appropriate for casual and intermediate collectors of U.S. revenue stamps. God willing, I’ll be able to add pages for more revenue categories moving forward. I hope you will enjoy these new pages, and welcome your feedback on what I’m doing.

Published 2020-08-02