Thickness Stamp?

just curious. as with all types of items made of paper, there is standard paper thickness in production.

Is there a standard thickness that is followed for stamp production? How thick or thin should a stamp be?

Stamp paper varies widely from goldbeater's skin to stamps printed on the reverse of maps. It all depended on circumstance. Modern Australian peel and stick, when washed are very fragile and thin.
The Americans in my view had the perfect stamp paper in the 60's through eighties. Paper that had attitude, and a beautiful perforation standard.
They are always nice to handle. (My 2c)

Some early papers are quite variable - thick and soft to thin and hard. I've often thought of using a micrometer to measure the thickness of stamps so that I could tell between a thick and a thin stamp but then I'm not sure if it would damage the stamp. I suppose if I had two stamps I could compare but if I only had one stamp I still wouldn't know if it was a thick or thin one!

Bruce, a micrometer is the accepted way to measure thickness,
just be vigilant and careful :)

there are stamps after soaking and rubbing out the residual gum, literally becomes porous when raised to sunlight.

I have noticed australian stamps are relatively quite thick, is this usually the case?

I think that would be the case with the classics (pre decimal), nic,
but modern 1980"s> tend to be thinner, and the die-cuts (self stick)
are very thin indeed.

Mitutoyo makes a digital micrometer (one of many they make) that is foolproof for measuring stamps. It is very controllable and gentle on the paper. I sneak across the room and borrow one whenever I need to get an answer on stamp thickness. I think they run about US$100, but don't quote me on that. Of course, you can spend a lot more, too, but this seems to be the entry level for measurements that are close enough for our purposes.

Conversion tables that relate mm measurements to weights of paper are plentiful; I've never found a source that lists thicknesses of any particular stamp issue, though. It is very quick at determining differences between any two stamps, in case you are unsure of whether one is thick paper or not.