Collecting
Revenue stamps were once widely collected by philatelists and given the same status as postage stamps in stamp catalogs and at exhibitions. After World War One, however, they declined in popularity, possibly due to being excluded from catalogues as the number of postage stamps issued rose rapidly and crowded revenues out.
The lowest point in revenue philately was during the middle years of the twentieth century. A Stanley Gibbons children's stamp album from the 1950s warned in its introduction: "Since Philately is the collecting of stamps that are employed in connection with the Posts, do not put in your album fiscals, telegraph stamps, tobacco-tax labels and other such strange things as are often found in some collections." This is not a definition of philately that would be recognised today.
More recently, revenue philately has become popular again and now has its own FIP (Fédération Internationale de Philatélie) Commission and is an approved category in FIP endorsed stamp exhibitions.
Many catalogs have been issued by specialist publishers and dealers but it is true to say that revenue stamps still do not feature in some of the most popular catalogs, for instance the Stanley Gibbons and Michel catalogs, unless they are both revenue and postage stamps. However, both the standard Scott and the Scott Specialised United States catalogue feature US revenue stamps.
Read more about this topic: Revenue Stamp
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)
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)