Soaking Stamps

If the stamp will soak off a paper envelope, then it will also soak off a cardboard envelope.  It just needs more time to get the cardboard soaked to the point where the gum on the back of the stamp will release.

Much of this thread deals with the problems of many countries and their self-adhesive stamps.  Some countries, like the US or the United Kingdom, used to have self-adhesive stamps that usually could be soaked, but now their newer stamp rarely can be soaked.  Some countries, like Canada, almost always can have their self-adhesive stamps soak off an envelope.  Self-adhesive stamps from some countries, like Brazil, could never be soaked off an envelope.  It's enough of a problem that many people have simply given up on trying to soak self-adhesive stamps - they just leave the backing paper in place (and the stamp catalogues which list and value stamps sometimes price these stamps with the envelope remnant attached - they don't think you need to fight with trying to get the backing paper off).  If you read through the previous posts, you'll get an idea about this and you can make up your own mind as to what you want to do.

Ryan

It's a general rule that water-activated gum (or what we call "lick and stick") will usually soak off when left in water, but that isn't 100% accurate, and it also doesn't mean that it will be a completely stress-free procedure!  If you spend enough time soaking stamps, you'll eventually run into problems of some sort.

Some stamps will get damaged by soaking.  Sometimes that's intentional - way back in the stamp stone age, countries were convinced that everybody was trying to remove old cancellations in order to use a stamp a second time, and they would print the stamp using a kind of ink that would get damaged if it was soaked in water.  Sometimes you will come across stamps like that - bright pink or purple is a stamp colour which is often used in this way and sometimes you'll soak a stamp and will find that the colour has soaked through the paper and can be seen on the back side, or it might be seen on the front side as a kind of bleeding into the unprinted area of the stamp, or even sometimes the ink will change colour.  We call that "fugitive ink".  And sometimes the same thing happens even though it was never intended to be the case - you have to watch out for stamps at Christmas time, if you get anything in a festive red or green envelope, the chances are very good that soaking the stamp will cause the colour in the envelope to damage the back of the stamp.  And even normal stamps can cause this bleeding problem if you let them soak too long.  Next time you come across some damaged copies of this common Abraham Lincoln stamp, try soaking them for 24 hours - the chances are excellent that you will see huge amounts of ink bleeding and you might end up with completely pink paper on the back of the stamp!



Look at these awful things - these Polish stamps are available from many different printings, some of which are on regular paper and some are on paper which has a fluorescent glow (for use by automatic cancellation machines).  The regular paper stamps are fine, no problems there, but the stamp designs are printed over top of the fluorescent layer on the other printings, and some of those fluorescent layers will dissolve in water.  The Netherlands Indies (now this country is Indonesia) also went through a phase where stamps were printed in an ink that dissolved in water.  Proof of concept here!  Some of these dissolve so quickly you can't get them off their backing paper before the image is damaged.



Sometimes the gum is almost indestructible, it seems to turn into a kind of cement over time.  Old 19th century Austrian stamps are a real problem, same with old Romanian stamps - I don't know this for certain, but I think perhaps they used animal-based gums.  Whatever the case, I've bought some pancreatin enzyme capsules in the hopes that it might be a solution.

USA & Canada stamps from the 1960s and earlier were almost always trouble-free as far as the gum was concerned.  They used a plant-based gum which came off easily and left the stamp back very clean.  By the 1970s, they were using synthetic gums and these often make the soaking water a bit cloudy and often the stamp needs a bit of light rubbing to help the gum come off cleanly.  By the 1990s, Germany was using a gum which leaves the water very cloudy - soaking a sink full of newer German stamps needs a change of water or you can no longer see the stamps that fall to the bottom of the sink.  And older British stamps (and all the little colonies for which they printed stamps) had a gum which turns kind of slimy - it often needs quite a bit of rubbing to get that stuff off, because if you don't, when it comes time to dry the stamp it will stick to whatever it is pressed against when the stamp goes through its drying & pressing stage.

Engraved stamps go through a printing process which uses a great amount of pressure and the paper those stamps are printed on is very tough.  Stamps which aren't engraved need much less pressure while printing and that paper is often weaker.  If you soak this 13c bell stamp, you will rarely damage anything regardless of how long the stamp is in the water soaking, but the paper on this 13c eagle is much weaker and softer, and if you need to rub the back of the stamp to help remove gum, you might cause damage to the paper (it sort of balls up and ends up looking like a towel that the cat has used to sharpen her nails ...).  This stronger / weaker paper trait is common to most countries but USA and Great Britain stamps seem to be among the worst for having weak paper on non-engraved stamps.



And there will be other examples of stamps with "normal" lick and stick gum which will cause you to pull your hair out, if you are prone to such excesses.  When you open the field up to include modern self-adhesive stamps, things get much crazier much more quickly and many collectors react by simply stopping their collection at a point before problematic self-adhesives became the norm.  I still collect (or rather, I "accumulate") such stuff - I'm no hair puller!  Good thing, I'm running out of hair anyway ...

Ryan

Don't worry too much about anything that is a "lick and stick" stamp - if your tongue is enough to make the gum on a stamp or an envelope sticky, then you can expect a sink full of water to get the gum soft enough that the paper will come off.  If all you have are self-adhesive stamps, then Canadian stamps are a good bet as 99.x% of them will come off when soaked in water long enough.

Go through your pile of stamps and separate out anything that looks like it's damaged - missing corners or rips in the stamp or perforations cut off by angry scissors or "marker monkeys" ruining the stamp by cancelling them with a scribbled pen mark or what have you.  You can then practice on a bunch of stamps that you know are more or less ruined already - as long as you don't accidentally set them on fire there's nothing much that will make them more ruined so go ahead and fill up something with water and give them a bath for a while.

Ryan

Just wondering if I am the only person who has successfully used a microwave oven for pre-drying stamps?

A question comes to my mind.

I know that if I've tried to soak a stamp with non-water-soluble adhesive, the stamp can get slightly wrinkled and bedraggled-looking. How about the other way around? If I apply Pure Citrus to a water-soluble stamp, will there be any after-effects?

I think I tried to give a Ramones T-shirt a head start on drying because I was going to see them that night and didn't want to run the dryer for half an hour or more just for one shirt, so I put it in the microwave, It wasn't terribly effective, and the iron-on-type logo was never quite the same. I ended up buying a new T-shirt, figuring they probably needed the money, and because I didn't wanna be a pinhead no more.

Beryllium Guy et al: this must have been some 30 years ago when I was playing around with on-paper mixtures. One day I found myself becoming impatient and gave the microwave process a trial run. The process involved patted-dry stamps between two sheets of paper towels for about a 30 seconds to a minute, trying to keep them slightly damp before placing them in a drying book. Biggest difficulty was fibers from perforation tips adhering to fuzzy paper towels. And I should mention the process went awry with a Canadian foil stamp when it started sparking.

Many thanks for your post, Roberto (ameis33).

If you are not satisfied with your results, I can recommend some changes, at least based on what I can see in your images.

• #1: Use paper towels for blotting excess moisture.  The stamps should only be damp, not wet, when they go into press flattening.
• #2: Never use textured paper towels, like the one in your photo, for press flattening, as the texturing can be pressed into the stamps.
• #3: I recommend placing the stamps face-down on a cardboard blotter, and then using waxed paper against the backs to prevent sticking to the blotter.

I have had very good success with this method.  In the early days, the stamps were too wet when I put them on the blotters, which resulted in water-staining of the blotters, and it also caused them to warp.  Removing the excess water is a key step prior to press-flattening.

Thank's for all the suggestions
Actually, the procedure i follow is a bit different then what you think.
After soaking i put stamps on a cotton tissue to do a first water removal.
Then i take stamps one by one and i place them on the paper tissue that you can see in the picture (so, that's the second step). I leave them on this tissue, in the open air, to dry completely. I put the stamps under the dictionary to press them just when they're completely dry (i check them), which usually takes 3-4 hours.
Then one night under the weight of words, but without the paper tissue.
I've seen someone's got an ink transfer. To be honest, i've never had this, perhaps because the paper is completely dry, perhaps i've been just lucky, but i'm going to put them in future inside two pergamin sheets.
After drying, usually the next day, removing damaged stamps, sorting the remaining ones and giving them a home.
That's the result. (In the top-left corner the damaged stamps... first reason to get disappointed...)





PS! This time i didn't wait one night to take stamps off the dictionary to show them to you. They are evidently not so flattened, but they're ok the same, they will flatten in the stock book...

The zodiak has just 12 different signs, and so when in 1997 there was the need of new figures, Poczta Polska could not extend the actual set and had to introduce a new definitive... The Polish Manor Houses...







The whole set is made by 25 stamps, but i couldn't get all of them... Considering the main supplier of my stamps was the grand mother of my wife, i could get basically letters or postcards, mostly ordinary mail, not registered, and 1st weight level, not abroad... I miss a lot of stamps to get which i should buy the complete set from a stamp supplier... That's another reason to be disappointed...
But also stamps have a lot of defects, mostly short teeth, wave cancel, small creases... Again another reason to be disappointed...

The tiny print on my bottle of pancreatin tablets says the contents are the following:

Pancreatic Enzymes:
Sus scrofa
Alpha-amylase
Triacylglycerol lipase
Protease

A list of 8 separate ingredients in the "high enzyme activity blend" then follows.

Ryan

Stan - I do not see this product as an enzyme - google it and you will note it is a "supplement"  to gain (?) muscle mass etc...

René

I missed something somewhere. What is you goal in using this enzyme?

Creatine is an amino acid and creatine monohydrate is one of several chemical formulations it can be found in. I think it must have been "PharmaPure" that was copyrighted, because established scientific names generally can't be copyrighted. It's popular with athletes as an energy booster and retainer that's considered safer than steroids and may (at least in the athlete's mind and confidence level) increase performance in strenuous events.

I was going to try some once, but I would have had to drive all the way to the nearest workout gym and I'm way too lazy for all that!

i have Solaray brand (been around since 1973)

"Supplying not less than 32,500 USP units Protease, 35,500US{ units Amylase and 2,600 USP units  Lipase.

It also contains 50 mg Papaya (Carica papaya leaf)

USP unit is the same as IU (International unit)... which still makes  this somewhat vague.

After soaking some Austria stamps that 'scrolled" up upon soaking, the Pancreatin worked well on some, but not all. Some of the earlier issues  remain nice little scrolls after 48 hours of soaking.  The ones that did relax were rinsed  in filtered water, blotted on a cotton 'barmaids" towel, and then placed in drying books. Nice and flat..... the others- I just checked again... still rolled up, but the Pancreatin does NOT (based on this small sample pool) appear to have any adverse affect on coloration of the stamps.

I do note the Pancreatin does not completely dissolve and exactly what the residue on the bottom is is unclear. I can state after 25 hours there was more sediment than when I started and I attribute this to gum that was removed. I did change solution at 24 hours (1 capsule into 1/3 cup filtered water (ambient)

Protease is not  highly soluble in water, but will dissolve in a saline solution...so maybe that is the next trial....

Thus far, Pancreatin does not appear to be 'thy Holy Grail"

BTW I looked up Sus scrofa and that's the Latin name for the wiid boar....(?)