Stamps With No Year.

How come there are hundreds, if not thousands, of stamps produced yearly with no visible year of issue? Am I missing something? It makes looking up the stamp info in the catalogues difficult.

If you are talking about US stamps, they are "Forever" stamps. A forever stamp is a postage stamp that is valid for First-Class postage no matter when it is used. When you a forever stamp is a perpetual stamp that never expires or declines in value. Its value is the First-Class Mail stamp postage rate for a one ounce letter at the time of use.

Yes, it does add to the challenge of looking up and finding issues in a stamp catalogue.

You might find it easier looking up a particular stamp using the stamps value as an area to start. A majority of issues with the same face value will usually be from the same period. Hope that makes it a little easier.

Some countries have had a year indicated on their stamps for a long time, the United States started doing this somewhere around the 1990's. Yes, it makes it a lot easier to look them up, but you have to remember that most countries ( including the US and Canada ) do not issue their stamps primarily for collectors.
Don't worry, when you are collecting for a while you will get the hang of some of this stuff!

Peter

A stamp's issuing year is frequently somewhere on it, in the text of its topic or as a notation printed more discreetly. But failing these you can usually infer the issue date by other means. For instance, a stamp portrait commemorating one of a nation's famous individuals will often include his or her birth and death dates,as will a stamp commemorating a specific event will give the date it occurred, and the stamp's issuance will be usually be on a significant anniversary (e.g., 50, 100, 200 years)of such dates, so those years would be the first ones you'd want to check in the catalog. As The Stamp Nut says, another way to identify the issue date is to be guided by the stamp's face value--quickly scan the catalog to see when your stamp's face value is the dominant one, and then look more carefully in that section. And finally, and perhaps most intuitively, as you develop a familiarity with a particular nation's stamps you will develop a sense of the overall stamp style or look of the various periods in its stamp history (e.g., stamps issued in the 1960s will ordinarily have a quite different look than those from the 2000s), and that will help make you feel more confident in determining a particular stamp's era.

I think you are all missing the main point. Hello There assumed that a stamp would simply have the date of issue printed on it. While this is something one might, on the face of things, reasonably assume, it is simply not the case. If I recall correctly, Hello There came over to SCF from its sister coin forum. Many coins do bear the date of issue. It was a reasonable assumption to think that stamps do as well. But unfortunately, it's a very misleading assumption.

Throughout the history of stamp issuing by all the various countries of the world, stamps that overtly bear the date of issue are very much the exception rather than the rule.

Given that rule of thumb, the various comments then apply. One can infer the date of issue of a stamp honoring the 50th anniversary of Alaska statehood if one knows the date of Alaska statehood. One may infer the date of issue honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven if one knows the date of Beethoven's birth. These are all indirect means of knowing the date. Indirect is far more common than direct.

And when stamps do carry the date of issue, many times is is found in tiny type at the bottom of the stamp.

This is simply the way stamps are. That's the first thing Hello There needs and deserves to know. Then he can usefully employ the rest of the advice given here.

Hieronymus is not entirely accurate about the infrequency of stamps' dating,although he's right that it's not always been the rule. I've just looked at the countries I collect for their commemorative stamps issued in the year 1990, and only Great Britain did not print a date on its stamps. The following countries all did: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland. These extra-textual notations were often in small type but I don't see what difference that makes. Definitive stamps, however, ordinarily do not have dates printed on them, and there were none among the definitives of those named countries who issued them in 1990. It's my impression that dating did not occur with any frequency for any stamps (save when a date was textual) before about 1965, say, but I haven't tried to verify that empirically.

I explicitly referred to the whole history of stamps.




Exactly my point.

That small dates at the bottom were printed on stamps of most countries in 1990 doesn't change the basic principle.

Hello There was surprised to find stamps without dates. It seems to me that giving him the basic principle, that it's been the exception rather than the rule, is both accurate and helpful.

Even if every country in the world put dates on its stamps between 1965 and 1995 (which they did not) it would still be the exception rather than the rule.

Styles of stamps changed over time. Early decades had monarchs' images on them. Commemoratives usually had frames until somewhere in post-World-War II era. Stamps were engraved or typographed, for the most part, until after the 2nd World War. So if you see a stamp with no frame, with a picture and background that just extends to the edge of the stamp or has the lesser "sharpness" of photgravure, you know not to look in the late 1800s or before 1950. Now, a novice may not know what photogravure looks like in comparison to engraved or typographed or what the framed commemoratives or monarchs' portraits look like compared to post-World-War II stamps.

But just sit down for an afternoon with a catalogue--Scott, Michel, Gibbons, it doesn't matter. Page through from 1880 to 1980 and just gaze at the pages. You can immediately form an impression of very old compared to middling to more recent. So if you truly have no indication of the stamp of it's date, you can peg it to within 20 or 30 years by its overall apppearance.

Edited for typos

In one case, Scott did something thoughtful. At the end of the listings for France, they put an alphabetical listing of stamps by subject, along with the catalog #. This is very helpful when there are not other ways of finding an issue date.

Agree with Hieronymous that the vast majority of stamps are not dated. In modern British Commonwealth (starting in the 1970s) most (but not all) stamps with date of issue are reprints. Still, many BC stamps were reissued only with a watermark or perf change. If you like dated stamps, a good country to collect is FSAT where most modern issues are dated in the margins.

How do you know where to look if there is no date on the stamp?

As the comments upthread explain you narrow the approximate date using any information carried by the stamp--commemoration of a person's birth or death, of an event, style of stamp etc. If it is a definitive series that doesn't commemorate events or persons then you just
have
to
look
through
the catalogue. Large definitive series often are easy to spot because they are, well, large.

But sometimes you just have to look. And look. And look. After you've done this for several stamps you will become familiar with that country's stamps and the next unknown stamp you pursue may trigger a recall--I saw that when I was looking for that other stamp.

Nothing can replace time and practice.

It may merely be a matter of taste, but I find it much easier to do this with a printed catalogue than clicking on various lines in an online catalogue like stampworld.com. I think one gains a better sense of what a country issued by paging through a printed catalogue. But that may simply be because I grew up with and live with and always will live with printed books. Those who grew up on flickering pixels may find stampworld.com easier.

But either way you have to look, look, look and then look some more.

The information provided so far is pretty much how it works. Don't get discouraged though! I've been collecting a long time and I still suffer from an occasional bout of what I call "catalog blindness"; the stamp is right there in front of you in the catalog and you keep missing it. I take a break or start cataloging another stamp. It is surprising how often you find the first stamp you are looking for.

With catalogs like Scott that don't have pictures for every stamp, you sometimes have to do some detective work. The pictures provided only faintly resemble other stamps of the series.

Sometimes, too, you'll run across a stamp that isn't listed (revenue issues, etc.)

When all else fails, post it here. 99.999% of the time you will get the correct answer. We won't do all your cataloging work but an occasional "I'm stumped" happens to a lot of us.

The more familiar you become with a country, the easier it gets. Hang in there and enjoy this hobby!

Dan

Very few countries put dates on their stamps prior to around 1960 or so, with the exception of a few commemorative issues that had the date front and center. Dates really didn't become commonplace until the 70's or 80's or even later for some countries, and some countries still don't do it. When it comes to small, regular-issue definitives, the majority of countries still don't put dates on them, because those stamps are re-printed regularly and used over an extended period of time. Even countries that have been putting dates on their stamps for decades do so for commemoratives only.

As a side note, the date can be really hard to find for some countries. For Australia, for example, it can sometimes take me a couple minutes to find where the date is hiding. The dates sometimes can be buried deep within the design in very, very tiny print. The one country I really wish had used dates more frequently is Japan. The 80Y rate lasted a really long time and included thousands of stamp issues, and very few of them have dates. It can be a real challenge finding a Japanese stamp in Scott between the years of 1995 and 2010 or so.

As an aside, you should know that dates on stamps can occasionally be a bit misleading. The USPS (or perhaps the vendor printing stamps for the USPS) sometimes neglects to change dates on reprinted stamps. The 10-cent American Clock coil was initially issued in 2006 with the appropriate date. It was reprinted in 2008, again with the appropriate date. Finally, it was reprinted again in 2013, this time with the 2008 date! The 2013 version still garnered a separate Scott catalogue number (3763a) due to a change in tagging (the 2008 stamp was tagged, the 2013 stamp was untagged).