Portal:Philately
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Philately is the study of revenue or postage stamps. This includes the design, production, and uses of stamps after they are issued. A postage stamp is evidence of pre-paying a fee for postal services. Postal history is the study of postal systems of the past. It includes the study of rates charged, routes followed, and special handling of letters.
Stamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps and related objects, such as covers (envelopes, postcards or parcels with stamps affixed). It is one of the world's most popular hobbies, with estimates of the number of collectors ranging up to 20 million in the United States alone.

The Melita issue is a series of dual-purpose postage and revenue stamps issued by the Crown Colony of Malta between 1922 and 1926, depicting the national personification Melita. They were commemorative stamps since they celebrated the islands' new status as a self-governing colony following a new constitution in 1921, but also a definitive issue intended for regular use over an extended period of time.
Designed by two leading Maltese artists, Edward Caruana Dingli and Gianni Vella, the issue consisted of stamps in various denominations from ¼d to £1; Caruana Dingli's designs were used on the pence and pound values and Vella's design on the shilling values. The designs were poorly received when they were issued, and Caruana Dingli himself criticized the execution of the design. In subsequent years, however, Caruana Dingli's design came to be regarded as one of the most iconic Malta stamps, and his design for the figure of Melita formed the basis of the Maltese lira banknotes of 1989–2008 and gold and silver bullion coins minted since 2018. (Full article...)
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The Mexican postal system has its roots in the Aztec system of messengers which the Spanish adopted after the Conquest. A postal service was established in 1580, mainly to communicate between the viceroyalty of New Spain with the motherland Spain. During the 18th century, Spain established a formal postal system with regular routes. In 1856, Mexico issued its first adhesive postage stamps, with "district overprints", a unique feature among postal systems worldwide, employed to protect from theft of postage stamps.
In 1891, the postal and stamp issuing authority was created as an administrative division of the Secretaría de Comunicaciones (Secretariat of Communications). It was called Servicio Postal Mexicano (Sepomex). In 1901, the Dirección General de Correos (General Direction of Mail) was made a separate government agency. The Palacio de Correos de Mexico is used since 1907 as main post office. (Full article...)
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Did you know (auto-generated)

- ... that working at a post office was how Derrick Harden became an NFL player?
- ... that an investigation into the Royal Oak post office shootings led one congressman to accuse the Postal Service of having been "asleep at the switch"?
- ... that James Diossa rescued the only public library and post office in Central Falls, Rhode Island, when the city went into bankruptcy?
- ... that Amrita Sher-Gil's painting Hill Women appeared on a 1978 Indian postage stamp?
- ... that both of Karl R. Free's New Deal-era U.S. post office murals with Native American subjects have been challenged as offensive?
- ... that after Irish post office clerk Maureen Flavin Sweeney reported worsening weather conditions, Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to postpone D-Day by 24 hours?
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The Yacht issue was a series of postage stamps, bearing the image of German Kaiser's yacht, SMY Hohenzollern II, that were used in all of Germany's overseas colonies. Millions of stamps were produced and they were the principal means of postage for all German imperial overseas possessions in the years 1900–1915. German colonies at that time were German Samoa, Kiautschou Bay, Togoland, Kamerun, German New Guinea, German South-West Africa, and German East Africa. (Full article...)
List articles

- List of philatelists
- List of most expensive philatelic items
- List of postage stamps
- Lists of people on postage stamps (article) • (Category page)
- List of entities that have issued postage stamps (A–E)
- List of entities that have issued postage stamps (F–L)
- List of entities that have issued postage stamps (M–Z)
- List of postal services abroad
- Timeline of postal history
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WikiProject
WikiProject Philately organizes the development of articles relating to philately. For those who want to skip ahead to the smaller articles, the WikiProject also maintains a list of articles in need of improvement or that need to be started. There are also many red inked topics that need to be started on the list of philatelic topics page.
Selected works
- Williams, Louis N., & Williams, Maurice (1990). Fundamentals of Philately {revised ed.). American Philatelic Society. ISBN 0-9335-8013-4.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Hornung, Otto (1970). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Stamp Collecting. Hamlyn. ISBN 0-600-01797-4.
- Stuart Rossiter & John Fowler (1991). World History Stamp Atlas (reprint ed.). pub: Black Cat. ISBN 0-7481-0309-0.
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Sources
- ^ "Philatelic Collections: General Collections". British Library. 2003-11-30. Archived from the original on 30 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-01-16.