The World's Most Famous Stamps

Yikes marbles , hopefully there is not much of that stuff. As a rule these mail order presentation packs are over priced and aimed at the uninformed. The quality of the stuff you have been showing suggests that your father in law would not have been buying these items himself but may have gotten them when buying other people's collections. They have little or no value.

Forgot to say that the monetary value is not important, the stamps are more important to my husband and looking at them and buying the odd one or four or more to complete the sets. I am just learning history and geography with them. The next thing we we would like to do is try and get the foxing sorted on duplicate stamps. 

hi Hugh which branch of the armed services was the target.?😁😁.          I guess you mean “uninformed”

As hdm1950 has indicated, the 1980s period was a boom time when everyone was being targeted with adverts to “ invest in stamps”.  A huge pension funds scandal in Spain and investment portfolios which turned out anything but , burst the bubble.

TheWestminster Collection was just one such company promoting stamps with a bit of “puff” and coffee table portfolios like this. Genuine stamps of course but not always of the top quality, and frequently costing more than the regular retail value.

if I may be critical, these three stamps are nice to have , but I would never have considered them “World Famous” .

if they were mine I would keep them in a GB collection in their proper year of issue and ditch the fancy folder altogether which adds nothing of significance other than taking up space……..but that’s me all over . I have a reputation as executioner in this forum 😎


as an after thought I have always found Corbitts of Newcastle good and reliable dealers an auctioneers.  I would be surprised if the folder here came from them . I suspect it was a mail order from Westminster Collection.   Not what I associate with Corbitts unless it was a resale via an auction lot. 

Alex (vikingeck), I have now combined the threads.  Thanks for pointing this out, as I had not realized that there were two alike myself!

No worries marbles , it takes time to get your way round the forum and you are handling it well. Some folk try to post images, get no result and give up, you have managed this quickly. WELL DONE !

We all start posting , get interrupted and post again….. I just did 🫢as you will note above …. And I have been here a lot longer than you .

It happens.

Keep the info coming . You will get good advice even if it hurts a bit now and then. I have collected for 70 years ( yes that’s right 70! ) and still have stuff to learn.

I wonder what stamps they included in that article as RARE ?

Interesting montage on the cover, there is not one single stamp there that I haven’t come across in my collecting career. So nothing out of the ordinary illustrated there, a couple are a bit unusual, not seen everyday but certainly nothing scarce and absolutely nothing rare!

Tend to agree,  I put it down to editors, highlighting a world hobby,  in what I think, was a fabulous way,
Life Magazine came with some high regard, perhaps a little click bait there, but  would have
inspired many kids and beginners.

This was 1954 after all.

I kick myself, I was sure I had the internal layouts of the "rare" issues inside the mag,  but dashed if I can find the scans right now.

I have the magazine somewhere in my Stamp Albums B.o.b.  (Back of book)

Life magazine also did articles on "colourful postage stamps" etc in later editions
In wonderful photographed layouts.

I 

One of our forum members youpiao , who is the host of the “Ted Talks Stamps” series on YouTube did a wonderful episode about those magazine issues. 

The vagaries of international copyright law mean that what I can see in Canada may well be different from what any of the rest of you around the world can see.  Be that as it may, I can read that 1954 Life Magazine issue on Google Books.  Here's the start of the article (there's more than one article on stamp collecting in that issue).



Ryan