CLASSIC ISSUES There are undoubtedly many philatelists who view modern stamp issuing policies with a certain degree of unease. There is a steady flow of new issues which is quite surprising in view of the steadily shrinking mail volumes. Modern self-adhesive stamps are furthermore difficult to handle and in many cases used stamps must be collected on piece as they cannot be removed from the envelope paper in a water bath. Collecting modern postage stamps gets more complicated with each year. The ever increasing postal rates are another problem in this connection. A recent stamp set can easily cost more than $10 and with the additional products usually offered (FDCs, souvenir sheets, etc.) it gets even more costly. Designs are frequently chosen to depict the season of the year and they are thus of very little permanent interest. In no way can today’s offset printed issues be compared with the beautiful recess-printed stamps of the past. But perhaps I am too conservative when it comes to stamps?
A typical example of a modern stamp issue is found in Fig. 1 – three se-tenant self-adhesive 10c stamps issued by Finland in 2008. But you don’t need any recent stamp issues at all to create very interesting and enjoyable collections as there are hundreds of thousands of older and far more exciting stamp issues to choose from. It is a well-known fact that many country collectors have already selected a year after which they don’t add any new issues. Some have put an end to their collections at the start of the new millennium while others have selected other years. Numerous collectors have decided to limit themselves to the classic period of philately but this immediately creates an intricate problem. When exactly was the classic period? As we shall see there are several wildly differing opinions on this and it gets really confusing when we check how catalogue editors handle this problem. In Sweden, the editors of the FACIT Classic catalogue have chosen to limit
Figure 1
66 - Stamp News
