Rest In Peace, Water-Activated Stamps

Just returned from a trip to Paris and London. While in Paris, I purchased some French international postcard rate stamps from the post office at the Louvre. That evening the two granddaughters filled out postcards to their friends. I gave the littlest one, eleven, one of the stamps and she attempted to somehow rub the stamp onto the postcard. Unfortunately that would never work since the stamp had water-activated gum. She had never seen one before, and apparently thought that all stamps were the self-adhesive "sticker" types. I had to show her that she had to lick it first and then stick it on the envelope. Best I can figure is that, based on her age, she is among the first generation of US children that hasn't really had to deal with licking stamps. A little sad in some way.

I bet they don't know what a disco ball is for either.

Reminds me of this old Family Circus stamp cartoon:

Yeah, I remember when people licked stamps :) Those days are gone...

I still lick stamps because I have lots of odds and ends of "flawed" stamps which I use for mail.
Just the other day I did ask my daughter if she needed some stamps for bills or correspondence...NO!...she uses online bill paying and texts her friends.
My son can't be bothered to tear off a stamp from an envelope for me..."five seconds of my life, I'll never get back".
I enjoy putting 4 or more "old" stamps on my mail and my Post Office enjoys hand stamping them for me.

Along with real gum, real perforations are also gone too.

Canada issued an interesting self-adhesive stamp in 2005 to commemorative the 100th anniversary of the province of Alberta (home for me). Although it was self-adhesive, it also had "real" perforations, holes punched through the stamp and the backing paper. I wonder if they'll try that again. I would imagine that all those tiny sticky discs of paper would easily separate from their backing paper and would gum up the perforating equipment in a hurry.

Ryan

Is it easy to remove the backing on the stamp to stick it on an envelope without damaging the perforations?

Has anyone a solution to remove a used self adhesive please? I live in the UK and receive a number of these. I've just been storing most of them but would be good to hear your solutions. Thanks.

I tend to wonder if the USPS actually sold off/junked their perf machines, etc. Lots of other countries still sell lick-and-stick stamps (and with FAR better quality, I might add). If the USPS got rid of the equipment, then we can never go back.

I wonder if there is a way of finding out just what happened to all that machinery...

For new issues, I only try collecting those issues that have both real gum and real perforations like stamps used to have rather than sticker stamps. This also has made it more affordable since it's only for a very few stamps rather than for all of them.

Remember, the USPS doesn't print stamps, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing originally did them, but as time went on, the USPS realized that they could get the printing done more competitively by bidding out contracts to private security printers. These days it is more or less limited to Ashton Potter, Sennett Security Printers and Avery Dennison. Unless its specifically written into the terms of the contract, none of these printing companies would want to waste time or effort (which equals money/profit) to do anything beyond what the contract calls for.

As far as "perforations" are concerned, the die cut perfs that are so common with today's self-adhesive stamps are intentionally made not for collectors but primarily as a means to thwart counterfeiting.

For anyone interested, there's an on-line report from back in the day when the USPS switched from the BOEP to private printers that explained some of the rationale for the move. It's an old story by today's standards, but I still find it to be interesting. Here's the link:

http://www.gao.gov/assets/220/211880.pdf

The Alberta stamp wasn't the only one to be released as a self-adhesive with real perforations, but it might have been the last. The Cunard / Allan issue of 2004 and the bridges issue of 2005 also were done this way. There weren't any more done in 2006, and I didn't check any future years. Both the bridges issue and the Alberta issue had images printed on the backing paper, which was a different touch. Not very noticeable on the Alberta stamp as a single, but as a pane or as a block of four bridge stamps, it looked nice.

It was little bit tough to get the backing paper off without bending the stamp. If you crimp the corner of the stamp, then the edge of the backing paper no longer lines up perfectly with the stamp and it's easier to get off, but then you have a crimped stamp. The stamps had curved cuts in the backing paper near the middle of the stamp, so if you pushed your finger in the middle of the stamp you could get the backing paper to split at the cut and that would give you a start at pulling it off. Getting the second half off without getting your fingers stuck on the half that had already been removed could be a bit tricky.

Ryan

A newspaper article describing the feelings about the 2005 end to the government's printing of stamps.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...1201253.html


-IBFS

Nice article. I only wish we could get numbers to compare the above statistics to today's costs.

(FYI, if you take $88.5 million in costs for 43.7 billion stamps, the price comes out to $0.002025 or roughly 2/10ths of a cent per stamp in 2004.)

Great, but sad, article..