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The United States Accomplishments in Space Commemorative Issue of 1967

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.

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A "Sieger cover"

The Apollo 15 postal covers incident, a 1972 NASA scandal, involved the astronauts of Apollo 15, who carried about 400 unauthorized postal covers into space and to the Moon's surface on the Lunar Module Falcon. Some of the envelopes were sold at high prices by West German stamp dealer Hermann Sieger, and are known as "Sieger covers". The crew of Apollo 15—David Scott, Alfred Worden, and James Irwin—agreed to take payments for carrying the covers; though they returned the money, they were reprimanded by NASA. Amid much press coverage of the incident, the astronauts were called before a closed session of a Senate committee and never flew in space again.

The three astronauts and an acquaintance, Horst Eiermann, had agreed to have the covers made and taken into space. Each astronaut was to receive about $7,000 (equivalent to $51,000 in 2023). Scott arranged to have the covers postmarked on the morning of the Apollo 15 launch on July 26, 1971. They were packaged for space and brought to him as he prepared for liftoff; he brought them aboard in a pocket of his space suit. They were not included on the list of the personal items he was taking into space. The covers spent July 30 to August 2 on the Moon inside Falcon. On August 7, the date of splashdown, the covers were postmarked again on the recovery carrier USS Okinawa. One hundred were sent to Eiermann (and passed on to Sieger); the remaining covers were divided among the astronauts. (Full article...)

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USPS Headquarters in Washington, D.C. (2024)

The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States, its insular areas and associated states. It is one of a few government agencies explicitly authorized by the Constitution of the United States. As of 2023, the USPS has 525,469 career employees and 114,623 non-career employees.

The USPS has a monopoly on traditional letter delivery within the U.S. and operates under a universal service obligation (USO), both of which are defined across a broad set of legal mandates, which obligate it to provide uniform price and quality across the entirety of its service area. The Post Office has exclusive access to letter boxes marked "U.S. Mail" and personal letterboxes in the U.S., but has to compete against private package delivery services, such as United Parcel Service, FedEx, and DHL. (Full article...)

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Image 1A postal stationery envelope used from London to Düsseldorf in 1900, with additional postage stamp perfinned "C & S" identifying the user as "Churchill & Sim" per the seal on the reverse shown on inset. A perfin, the contraction of 'PERForated INitials', is a pattern of tiny holes punched through a postage stamp. Organizations used perforating machines to make perforations forming letters or designs in postage stamps with the purpose of preventing pilferage. It is often difficult to identify the originating uses of individual perfins because there are often no identifying features but when a perfin is affixed to a cover that has some user identifying feature, like a company name, address, or even a postmark or cancellation of a known town where the company had offices, this enhances the perfin.
Image 2A fawn colored UPSS size 7 stamped envelope, watermark 6, laid paper, US postal stationery envelope from the Plimpton series of 1883.
Image 3A magnifying glass is a convex lens which is used to produce a magnified image of an object. The lens is usually mounted in a frame with a handle though other designs are produced. A magnifying glass works by creating a magnified virtual image of an object behind the lens. Stamp collectors frequently use magnifying glasses to inspect their stamps. This photograph shows the magnified image of the Deutsche Post 1 Reichsmark stamp issued on May 12 1946.
Image 4Widespread hoarding of coins during the American Civil War created a shortage, prompting the use of stamps for currency. To be sure, the fragility of stamps made them unsuitable for hand-to-hand circulation, and to solve this problem, John Gault invented the encased postage stamp in 1862. A normal U. S. stamp was wrapped around a circular cardboard disc and then placed inside a coin-like circular brass jacket.
Image 5A crash cover is any type of cover, (including air accident cover, interrupted flight cover, wreck cover) meaning any piece of mail that has been recovered from a fixed-wing aircraft, airship or aeroplane crash, train wreck, shipwreck or other postal transportation accident during its journey from sender to recipient. In many cases it was possible to recover some or even all of the mail being carried and the postal authorities typically apply a postal marking (cachet), label, or mimeograph that gets affixed to the cover explaining the delay and damage to the recipient, and possibly enclose the letter in an "ambulance cover" or "body bag" if it was badly damaged and forwarded to its intended destination.
Image 6A military stamp used by the British forces in Egypt around 1935
Image 7Cover sent by Zeppelin from Gibraltar on 20 November 1934 to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via London and Berlin for the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 that took place between the 8th and 19th. The two red "MIT LUFTSCHIFF GRAF ZEPPELIN" and green circular marking were applied by the post office. This is a printed matter item that has been registered.
Image 8A 1910 Italian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand
Image 9Unissued 1956 £1 Jamaican chocolate and violet, the first stamp designed for Queen Elizabeth II. Held in the British Library Crown Agents Collection.^[1]
Image 10Ross Dependency 1957 issue (3 of 4 stamps)
Image 11Advertising for the stamp dealer Charles Nissen on a booklet pane from the 1929 PUC stamps of Great Britain.
Image 12This is a very scarce use of the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black, used on first day of valid use, May 6, 1840, tied by red Maltese Cross cancellation on folded cover to Warwickshire, brown "C MY-6 1840" first day datestamp on backflap verifies date of use. This was sold as lot 1018 at Robert Siegal's 2006 Rarities of the World auction for $45,000.
Image 13A 1956 half penny stamp of the British Solomon Islands
Image 14United States newspaper and periodicals stamps of 1875

Did you know (auto-generated)

... 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 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 in 2007, Arthur Gray's £2 Kangaroo and Map stamp sold for a world record price for a single Australian stamp?
... that Argentinian Ricardo D. Eliçabe qualified as a physician, co-founded a petroleum refinery, and wrote about forgeries of Bolivia's first stamps?

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The following are images from various philately-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 11834 pre-adhesive mail with Wittingen straight-line town handstamp to Ebsdorf (from Postal history)
Image 2The first United Nations stamp issued in 1951. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 3The 1985 postage stamp for the 115th birth anniversary of Vladimir Lenin. Portrait of Lenin (based on a 1900 photography of Y. Mebius in Moscow) with the Tampere Lenin Museum. (from Postage stamp)
Image 4Lovrenc Košir, 1870s (from Postage stamp)
Image 5The Red Mercury, a rare 1856 newspaper stamp of Austria (from Postage stamp)
Image 6The main components of a stamp:
1. Image
2. Perforations
3. Denomination
4. Country name (from Postage stamp)
Image 7A 1979 stamp issued for the United Nations Geneva office, denominated in Swiss francs. (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 8A philatelic First Day Cover from Abu Dhabi (from Postage stamp)
Image 9The Basel Dove stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 10Bavarian postal stationery postcard used from Nuremberg to Munich in 1895 (from Postal history)
Image 11The US Mail postage stamp of Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim from 1961 (from Postage stamp)
Image 12A Costa Rica Airmail stamp of 1937 (from Postage stamp)
Image 13The Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp (1 May 1840) (from Postage stamp)
Image 14Zeppelin mail from Gibraltar to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Berlin on the Christmas flight (12th South American flight) of 1934 (from Postal history)
Image 15Pre-stamp 1628 lettersheet opened up showing folds, address and seal, with letter being written on the obverse (from Postal history)
Image 16The controversial 1981 United Nations stamp focusing on the "Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People". (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 17Rows of perforations in a sheet of 1940 postage stamps (from Postage stamp)
Image 18First flight cover for Nassau to Miami airmail route in 1929 (from Postal history)
Image 19Rowland Hill (from Postage stamp)
Image 20Le Philatéliste by François Barraud (1929) (from Postage stamp)
Image 21The Penny Red, 1854 issue, the first officially perforated postage stamp (from Postage stamp)
Image 22Postal censorship of 1940 civil cover from Madrid to Paris opened by both Spanish and French (Vichy) authorities (from Postal history)
Image 23With the growth of urban centres across the Western hemisphere in the 19th century Post Offices were located on main arterial routes (from Postal history)
Image 24A busy United Nations Post Office at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City (from United Nations Postal Administration)
Image 25The first officially perforated United States stamp (1857) (from Postage stamp)
Image 26A 1987 Faroe Islands miniature sheet, in which the stamps form a part of a larger image (from Postage stamp)

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The Treskilling Yellow, or three schilling banco error of color (Swedish: Gul tre skilling banco, literally "yellow three skilling banco"), is a Swedish postage stamp of which only one example is known to exist. This stamp was cancelled at Nya Kopparberget (now known as Kopparberg), about 150 kilometres (93 mi) from Uppsala, on July 13, 1857. It was last sold in 2010. The auction house valued the stamp between £1.29 million and £1.73 million before the sale. The winning bid was kept confidential. (Full article...)

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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.

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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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