Postage stamp collecting is one of the most popular hobbies in the world, with over 20 million collectors in the United States alone! Stamps are one of the easiest investments to store and preserve, more so than jewelry or art. Postage stamp collecting — or Philately — is so widespread that there are organizations, festivals and magazines all dedicated to the subject.

American postage stamp collecting began with the issuance of a 5-cent Ben Franklin and a 10-cent George Washington in 1847. People found that collecting stamps was a cheap investment, as well as an easy way to display historical artifacts. Like their British counterparts, they often passed down stamp collections from generation to generation. Today some of those early stamps go for $500 to $200,000!

It became the misprints that became the most coveted in the world of collecting postage stamps. Most serious collectors will try to seek out a rare stamp resulting from a printing error. For instance, the “Inverted Jenny” is a US postage one from 1918 featuring a photo of a Curtiss JN-4 airplane where the plane was mistakenly printed upside-down!

Only 100 were ever printed and a block of four just sold at an auction for $2.7 Million! The US-made “Benjamin Franklin Z Grill” ones were made with a waffle pattern embossed into the paper supposedly to prevent the ink from running. Only two were printed before they realized this process was impractical. Now one stamp could get as much as $3 Million!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Arts, Crafts & Hobbies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.