Collecting
Most postal stationery pieces are collected as entires, that is, the whole card, sheet or envelope. However, as the saying goes, one collects today what was saved yesterday. In the 19th century the practice was to collect "cut squares" (or cut-outs in the UK) which involved clipping the embossed indicia from a postal envelope. This destroyed the envelope. As a result, one cannot tell from a cut square what specific envelope it came from and, many times, the cancellation information. The manner in which the stamped envelope is cut out (defined by the term "knife") vanishes on a cut square. Thus most collectors prefer entires to cut squares.
Many country-specific stamp catalogs include postal stationery in their listings and there are many books devoted to the postal stationery of individual countries. The current, but now dated, principal encyclopedic work is the nineteen volume Higgins & Gage World Postal Stationery Catalog.
Read more about this topic: Postal Stationery
Famous quotes containing the word collecting:
“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?”
—Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)