I see a fair amount of mail in my job, including competition entries sent in on postcards, which are generally stamped, as opposed to the usual meter-franked business mail.
The weird thing is, I quite often see really quite old stamps used to make up the postage. For example, one I saw today had the 32 pence first-class rate made up with a 20p stamp from 1997 and – get this – 4½p and 8½p stamps which, I find, date from 1974 and 1976 respectively*! We did away with the halfpenny in 1984, but presumably any stamps denominated in decimal currency are still good as far as the Royal Mail is concerned.
I see this kind of thing too frequently for it to be a freak “Gee, look what I found at the back of the drawer here” occurrence, and it seems to happen a lot with competition entries – sent, presumably, by people who enter a lot of competitions and get through a lot of postage.
So what’s going on? Is somebody selling off bargain-bucket unused stamps at below face value, which these people bulk buy?
OK, I now notice that adds up to 33p. I guess they were out of 3½p stamps…
Wow! Your idea of really old and mine* a miles apart! I have left over two cent stamps from the 70s that I will use the next time we have a postage increase. I don’t know how I ended up with so many.
If you are seeing even older stamps than that, it’s possible that people are getting rid of parts of a collection. Mr. Stuff corresponds with a relative that used to be quite into stamp collecting. Apparently the stamp collecting hobby market has completely crashed, so he’s using the things instead of saving them. Now when we get letters from him, they have all sorts of interesting postage on them.
Don’t know if that’s true across the pond, or not, but it’s a possibility.
In a similar vein, my mom bought a collector’s book of stamps at a garage sale a couple of summers ago. She doesn’t know anything about stamp collecting, but she does know arithmetic, and noticed that the face value of the stamps was more than the garage sale price, and so now she’s sticking them on letters.
So it might not necessarily be someone offloading es own collection, but someone with someone else’s collection.
I friend of mine is a stamp collector and I asked him the same question.
Lots of people will buy a block of stamps (like in a 10x10 block) because they think it will be collectible and worth a lot of money some day. ( :rolleyes: ) Obviously, they make millions of sheets of stamps and almost none of those will end up being collectible. No one wants them. So years later the would be collector or his heirs try to sell them to a stamp merchant and they get the bad news. They’ll get an offer of like 50% of face value and a lot of the time will go for it.
When my buddy would get stamp catalogs, the envelops in which they were mailed would be covered in weird old stamps.
My parents died recently and I’ve been going through their things. When I find old stamps (nothing older than myself, mind you) I put them aside so I can use them. My father’s hobby was model railroading and my mother liked birds, so they had set aside railroad and bird stamps.
In the US, after WWII, when everyone had money, as opposed to the Depression, it became fashionable to save sheets of mint stamps. And the trend continued up until about the 1980’s. Multiple sheets. As an investment. Unfortunately, when everyone invests in something, that means it isn’t likely to be rare. And that’s what happened.
It’s not unusual for our business to purchase $1000.00 face value in sheets of mint postage. We buy this for $700.00 That’s the going rate. We then reuse these stamps on packages as postage.
If I used really old stamps, it would probably mean that I couldn’t find the current ones, and just used whatever I managed to dig up when I went rummaging through the office. I use stamps so infrequently, I never know where they are.
Obviously “old” is relative. My parents’ collection contains stamps right back to the 1840s.
But considering most stamps that are not “collected” get used within a few months of being purchased, I’d say 30 years old is “really old”. I mean, who buys stamps and then leaves them lying round for three decades before using them?
Consider this: because of decimalisation, the oldest British stamps you could possibly use date from 1970 (the decimal-denominated ones which were issued a few months before decimal currency came in in 1971). Actually, I guess you could use stamps valued at £1 and above issued in pre-decimal times, but you’d be dumb to do so since they would likely be worth a lot more to collectors.
You think that’s old. Supposedly, an absentee ballot mailed to Broward County was posted with an inverted Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny” aircraft stamp issued in 1918. It’s the most famous misprinted stamp and is supposedly worth $100,000. This story has Urban Legend written all over it, but Snopes has no comment on it. The article says that only 3 of the stamps are unaccounted for, so the story sounds even more suspicious. The ballot was locked away for 22 months.
I guess that, because American currency hasn’t changed for so long, old US stamps wouldn’t stand out as much as these UK ones, which I noticed initially because of the half-penny denominations. I only barely remember using half-pennies (I was 7 years old when they were phased out) so seeing half-penny stamps on a letter is kind of weird.
So to answer my original question, the most likely reason is stamp dealers selling off mint stamps from broken-up collections?
Or people inheriting stamp collections that dealers tell them are worthless.
Probabably also people buying stuff at car boot sales, as mentioned earlier.
In the 1960s an old boy showed me and a pal a load of Victorian copper, mainly penny pieces. We were sure that they were worth something. Later I found that he was paying the milkman with them - well I helped the milkman, and he paid me in those coppers.
A lot of philatelic mail has old but worthless stamps on it. There are several stamp dealers in Sydney who do mail order to collectors, and they use old non-collectible stamps for the postage. I think for them it’s just advertising presence and cuteness value. The real goodies are inside the envelope.
I don’t understand why anyone would sell $1000 worth of usable stamps for less than face value. If I offered you $700 for a valid thousand-dollar bill, would you consider that a worthwhile exchange?
Good point - I use, what, five bucks of stamps a year at the absolute utmost? I write letters to my grandmother, send Christmas cards, and there’s one bill a month that has to be mailed.