What makes a stamp exciting?
Many postal services are asking themselves: how can I sell even more stamps without offering a 'service' in return? The Netherlands is no exception. In recent years, we have seen this with stamps featuring peculiarities such as 'with scent', hidden texts or images, relief printing, and so on. Many countries preceded us in using relief printing. Does something like this make the stamp exciting and therefore more collectible?
Relief printing is very old, and many stamps feature images pressed into the stamp paper. To me, the finest example is the relief stamp of Bavaria. As early as January 1, 1867, the Royal Bavarian Post issued a series of stamps bearing an image of the Bavarian coat of arms. They were printed by the Royal Mint using letterpress and relief printing.
Six different stamps in values from 1 Kreuzer up to and including 18 Kreuzer. The stamps were unperforated and were often roughly cut from the sheet.
From July 1, 1870, the stamps were reprinted and now provided with perforations.
Several stamps also appeared in altered colors. Furthermore, a different type of paper was used, first with a watermark of so-called narrow diamonds, later with wide diamonds.
watermark narrow windows, wide windows and wavy lines
On August 5, 1874, a stamp was added with a value of 1 Mark. It was violet in color.
The stamps from 1 Kreuzer up to and including 18 Kreuzer were printed on yet another type of paper, now with a watermark in the form of wavy lines.
On January 1, 1876, the Kreuzer was abolished as a unit of currency and replaced by the Pfennig. Before that, therefore, the Kreuzer. At that time, a Guilder or Florin was worth 60 Kreuzer and 1 Mark was 35 Kreuzer. From 1876, the Imperial Currency was introduced; 1 Mark was 100 Pfennig. The lowest value became a stamp of 3 Pfennig in green, and the highest 50 Pfennig in red.
The stamps were reprinted several times in different colors and new values were added. Such as a 2 Mark in 1890.
The last stamps in this series were issued on January 1, 1900 (values in Pfennig) and 1911 (3 and 5 Mark), after which an entirely new series was issued in 1911 featuring the image of the 90-year-old Prince Regent Leopold.
What is exciting to me about the series of coat-of-arms stamps? Not that they are printed in relief, even though it is very beautifully applied. For me, the challenge is to find all those variations, the different watermarks, nuances in the colors used, in order to trace the reprints. What do you find so exciting about stamps? 
I received the following response from Eric: "Is collecting and researching stamps exciting? Not so much the collecting, I think, but rather examining the stamp more closely and thus studying the image. Or am I being too much of a thematician then? Exciting for people like Rein B., who examines every detail in the print and paper. Then it is exciting to find something unusual."
It is certainly exciting to suddenly come across an object (stamp, postal item, postmark) that you can use in a collection, that was already known, and then surfaces as if it has never been shown to you in the literature.
In short, exciting has versatile applications. It is clear that what I find exciting is entirely different from what you do. The similarity is that we can both enjoy ourselves so much with stamps.
Eric is a thematic collector, and from his perspective, I agree with him. Do you?
Yes, everyone has their own perspective on the stamps; imagine if we both fell for the same woman (Man)!!!!!!
From a thematic point of view, I agree with him. However, personally, I have no interest in thematic matters.
That does not alter the fact that discovery can be fun. What could be more enjoyable than stumbling upon something that has not yet been described? I know that principle all too well. There are many things that have not been written about in philately. Especially if you are specializing in a particular field. For instance, everyone thinks that the first issue from the Netherlands has been fully described. Phew, that is quite a disappointment for those who think that.
But also simple emissions that are hardly, if at all, collected by specialist collectors. That is actually a shame, because there is much more to them than people think.
The biggest problem you actually run into when conducting research is how to handle your knowledge. There are collectors who keep all knowledge to themselves, and when they die, all knowledge is lost. Sometimes this is a real shame because they were true experts in a particular field. Others write a short piece about it in the local club magazine and do not reach far enough for collectors seeking information, for whom it is precisely what is interesting. Or they turn it into a nice little story to fill pages. This is not meant negatively, but for people who want to delve deeper, it is not very interesting, except to become interested in the area described. Others publish it on a website which is taken down after a while or has not been actively maintained for a long time. That is a pity, because knowledge is lost that way too. The association library is a great source of information, but unfortunately, it is not active 24/7. The internet is also a great source of knowledge, but it is a jungle of sites that you can no longer see the wood for the trees.
So you can also ask yourself: have you actually found something that is in the literature, or is it just fiction?
This wonderful hobby is indeed so broad that everyone can derive a lot of pleasure from it.
I am of the opinion that a thematic collector of, for example, pigeons, for example, should also know the difference between offset and intaglio printing regarding the “flying dove” stamps of the Netherlands.
@Alex: I completely agree with what you wrote, but I think it is also a bit the nature of the beast: indeed, nothing is ever fully described, because no sooner is it finished than new facts surface anyway. A good example of this is the rather extensive descriptions in the Handboek Postwaarden Nederland (at least, for me there is a lot of new information in it), but the installment on the Juliana En Face series had barely been published before news emerged about the fact that the concealed crowns were later visible on the stamps of the Netherlands Antilles after all.
While I do indeed think that much written literature (out of necessity) does not go much further than trying to interest people in a particular subject, writing and continuing to write is still the only thing you can do to preserve as much knowledge and information as possible and make it available. And even sites that are no longer active can still yield results, provided you know how to search effectively. Blogs like this are naturally a good tool for that, although there might sometimes be a degree of generalization here as well, because it is run by multiple people and has a familiar audience, and perhaps does not lend itself entirely to excessive specialization. On my own blog, I just spout all sorts of things, unhindered by any knowledge of who is reading it, ranging from big chatter to general to somewhat less general topics, and I also simply ask about everything I don't know there, and yet it always turns out that someone reads it and knows more. Those forged Wilhelmina stamps from my little article on this blog today are a fine example of that. It was featured on my own blog last November, and thanks to a number of knowledgeable readers and some websites I found, I now know who made them and who definitely didn't. Put that info down somewhere again, and the next sleuth might have an easier time. In that respect, the internet really is something mega-amazing!
By the way, Cees, beautiful stamps!
I also think it is virtually impossible to describe ALL relevant information about a stamp or an issue somewhere. I have great admiration for the quality of the Handboek Nederlandse Postwaarden, but not EVERYONE has access to it. It is a select group that can and wants to pay the supplements of 25 euros each. Hopefully, this “standard work” will end up in many libraries.
‘@ Arjan:
Of course, writing and continuing to write is important, but it can also work against you when you are seeking information. Take as a starting point a simple collector who wants to know something about the forgery of the 1913 Poor Law series. If I then read on website A and subsequently read website B and read discrepancies between where I can recognize these items and images that are unclear and serve as examples, you are running into trouble as an inexperienced collector. Especially if, in addition, you read a few articles from association magazines that say or show something different again.
Everyone who writes about it has their own style and tries to help fellow collectors in their own way.
However, the problem of information fragmentation does arise. Who is right and who is wrong, who is complete and who is not? These are just a few questions that follow. I regularly encounter situations where people think they have found something interesting, only to have to disappoint them by saying they do not have what they thought they did, either because they did not understand what they read or because there were no clear illustrations accompanying the single article they had read, even though multiple articles exist.
This is precisely one of the biggest problems in information provision. Information fragmentation and failing to ask clear questions when searching for information, because one lacks knowledge of what one is looking for (various search terms) or cannot formulate a clear question.
This is essential when looking for something!
Especially if you are going to study stamps!!
'@ Alex, yes, that is certainly true, but is there an alternative? Ideally, there should be a global source of information available, into which only information verified for accuracy is allowed. A kind of Wikipedia for philately. But just hearing how much criticism there is of that…
I wonder if you can set up a suitable form of information gathering and transfer. And it almost certainly has to be virtual, because otherwise the costs, as Toon rightly points out, would be too high for many, and then you would be excluding precisely the group you are trying to reach.
Therefore, I do not readily see any other solution than to simply try to make as much information available as possible, maintain it, and adjust it where necessary. As a researcher at any level, you must apply a large dose of common sense and continue to question the information found.
But it is far from ideal, I agree with you on that.
‘@arjan:
It is certainly a difficult subject.
I don't really have a solution yet either.
Although I have been working on this problem for quite some time.
'@ Toon, I agree with you that not everyone can afford that 25 euros, especially when you know that the Handbook will never be finished.
New things are constantly being released.
(I am curious how they describe the personalized seals).
But what I want to say about the Handbook is that it really should be in every association library.
This subscription is then paid jointly, and everyone can borrow the Handbook.
That is how it happens at our Club (EKPV), in any case.
‘@Alex
There is no universal solution because everyone views and describes everything in their own way. Attempts to standardize this are doomed to fail. Let everyone who has something to say do so on the internet and shout it from the rooftops.
And just carry on….
‘@Albert,
You put it quite well: the never-ending volume, the Handbook of Dutch Postal Values. If you take a quick look at the index, you will see that plans only go up to 1993! The rest will probably never come, unless they start publishing more installments per year.
This is therefore also a warning to Elsevier: if things don't move faster, more and more people will cancel their subscriptions, until production costs become relatively too high, and then it is “end of project”.
…….maybe that is the intention!
Hello Elsevier, WAKE UP!
Frits,
To present thematic information—in your case, the pigeon—it is surely not necessary to know how that pigeon was depicted on the paper. It is about the species of pigeon or the manner of flight (otherwise I know nothing about pigeons), and certainly not the printing technique. That seems to me more a matter for those who need to be able to distinguish fake pigeons or for those who specialize in paper or printing techniques.
As a thematic collector, it is quite nice to know a bit more about the stamp itself. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the paper or the perforations. It can also be an answer to questions such as: how many colors were used, what is the style, and who designed it?
But do you know what I find fun, or exciting if you will? When everything fits into my album like that, and a colorful, orderly, and creative whole emerges. That you then open your album and sit there gaping at it with such intense satisfaction.
Or whip up a nice envelope to send, where the stamps match the color of the envelope, and the address is written in a beautiful, flowing style. Those are the nicest.
Absolutely ridiculous perhaps in the eyes of more traditional stamp collectors, or non-stamp collectors, but that’s exactly my fun... it’s a bit of an artistic expression, isn't it?
'@Tone
The Dutch Postage Values Handbook
runs on a single-person engine with 2 assistants: Gert Holstege with Jan Vellekoop and Ruud vd Heuvel.
“…….maybe that is the intention!
"
In addition to his work at the HPN, Gert is a professor in Groningen with research assignments of far-reaching importance to the knowledge of the human body, particularly the brain and the nervous system. No philatelic interest can outweigh the importance of this subject matter!
Toon, just to set something straight: The Handbook of Dutch Postage Stamps is a publication of Joh. Enschedé in Amsterdam. Not of Elsevier. When the first volume appeared, sponsors such as KPN, TPG Post, Leiden University, the Philately Foundation, the University of Groningen, and the VSB Fund were the ones who made the publication possible. Furthermore, of course, the subscribers. But here too, the 'aging population' is likely to blame for the steadily declining number of subscribers.
'@ Toon,Why until 1993?
Was no documentation of the postage values written down or preserved afterwards?
Try to rope Rein in to contribute to the Handbook of Postage Stamps after 1993; he certainly knows what he's talking about or writing...
Sorry Elsevier... mistake. But I still have my concerns, even if Enschedé goes ahead with it. And Albert, no one has made an adapted plan since 1993. Incidentally, I still find *The HNP* a fantastic book from which I get a lot of information.
'@ Alex & @ Arjan
The BondsKeuringsDienst (BKD) is a service department and part of the KNBF. The BKD is always available to advise and assist the members of the Association. This includes providing free information (on “Poor Law” stamps, for example) and simple inspections, where possible. We only need to be careful not to make current counterfeiters any wiser than they already are.
Should you require further information, please email: bondskeuringsdienst@gmail.com
What I find exciting about stamps is not the stamps themselves, but the cancellations on them. Around 1980, after collecting stamps for eight years, I discovered that there were people who collected stamps because of the cancellation mark on them. A whole new world opened up for me. Then it turned out that there had also been a great many different types of cancellations over the years, just in the Netherlands alone. Anyway, that is what I started specializing in.
There, too, it is a challenge to make finds that have not yet been catalogued. And there, too, completeness with any type whatsoever will not be achieved quickly. For instance, in 1996 I had produced a catalogue of Large Circular Stamps and was quite proud, after having ploughed through various collections of advanced collectors, to be able to report a handful of 'new' finds compared to previous catalogues. But the ink was barely dry when someone called me to say that he had a postal item with the large circular stamp Rede. He believed that one was quite rare. Indeed, I had just listed it in the catalogue as never having been encountered 'in real life'... This one was actually taken out of service after only 1.5 months following its issue in Jan. 1898, because a new stamp was introduced with the changed spelling Rheden. And uncatalogued finds are still being made.