Portal:Philately
Philately portal | WikiProject Philately |
The Philately Portal
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 state communications in the Neo-Assyrian Empire allowed the Assyrian king and his officials to send and receive messages across the empire quickly and reliably. Messages were sent using a relay system (Assyrian: kalliu) which was revolutionary for the early first millennium BCE. Messages were carried by military riders who travelled on mules. At intervals the riders stopped at purpose-built stations, and the messages were passed to other riders with fresh mounts. The stations were positioned at regular intervals along the imperial highway system. Because messages could be transmitted without delay and without waiting for riders to rest, the system provided unprecedented communication speed, which was not surpassed in the Middle East until the introduction of the telegraph.
The efficiency of the system contributed to the Neo-Assyrian Empire's dominance in the Middle East and to maintaining cohesion throughout the empire. These Assyrian innovations were adopted by later empires, including the Achaemenid Empire which inherited and expanded the Assyrian communication network. (Full article...)
Selected article -
The GU postcode area, also known as the Guildford postcode area, is a group of 38 postcode districts in South East England, within 24 post towns. These cover west Surrey (including Guildford, Woking, Godalming, Cranleigh, Farnham, Camberley, Lightwater, Bagshot, Windlesham, Virginia Water, Hindhead and Haslemere), north-east Hampshire (including Aldershot, Farnborough, Fleet, Yateley, Petersfield, Alton, Bordon, Liphook and Liss), northwestern West Sussex (including Petworth and Midhurst) and a small part of south-east Berkshire (including Sandhurst).
Mail for this area is sorted at the Jubilee Mail Centre in Hounslow.
(Full article...)Selected images
Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that working at a post office was how Derrick Harden became an NFL player?
- ... 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 a new Christmas stamp that debuted in the 350-person town of Bethlehem, Georgia, in 1967 got so much attention that the two-employee post office had to hire forty-three temporary workers?
- ... that after Irish post office clerk Maureen Flavin Sweeney reported worsening weather conditions, Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to postpone D-Day by 24 hours?
General images -
Selected stamp -
The Whole Country is Red is a Chinese postage stamp, issued on 24 November 1968, which contained a problem with the design. The stamp features a map of China with the words "The Whole Country is Red" (Chinese: 全国山河一片红), with a worker, farmer, and soldier standing below with copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao, but Taiwan is not shaded red, merely outlined. The face value of the stamp is 8 fen.
Taiwan was not shaded red as at the time of printing, it was (and remains so as of 2024[update]) under the control of the Republic of China instead of the PRC. The official reason given for the withdrawal of the stamp was that the Spratly and Paracel Islands were missing from the map, as well as the borders with Mongolia, Bhutan, and Myanmar being incorrectly drawn. The stamp had been distributed for less than half a day when an editor at China Cartographic Publishing House noticed the problem with Taiwan and reported it to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. As a result, all Chinese post offices had to stop selling the stamp and return all copies, with only a small quantity making it to private collectors. The designer of the stamp, Wan Weisheng, said in an AFP interview, "For a long time I was really worried that I would be jailed". (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
Related portals
Topics
Categories
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.
Wikimedia
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
-
Commons
Free media repository -
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals -
Wikidata
Free knowledge base -
Wikinews
Free-content news -
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations -
Wikisource
Free-content library -
Wikiversity
Free learning tools
Other Portals
Sources
- ^ "Philatelic Collections: General Collections". British Library. 2003-11-30. Archived from the original on 30 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-01-16.