Can Hinges Be Soaked Off?

My personal belief is there is no need for drying books. The hobby functioned perfectly well without them for decades. I've always thought they were a bit scammy.

As for hinges, in my small area (NSW De La Rue issues) I have soaked countless stamps to remove hinges. The stamps are colour fast so I use water only just off the boil. Traditional hinges float off in seconds (or less!) but improvised hinges can take a little longer, but not much.

Fugitive inks should not be soaked. There are other methods, but since I don't collect stamps with fugitive inks I'll leave that one to those with more expertise than me.

I don't see any need for stamp drying books. And the ones I've used never worked very well and disintegrated after awhile.

I use cloth dish towels (the flat kind, not the 'fuzzy' kind). Lay the wet stamps down in rows, and in a few hours or overnight you can remove them dry. Paper towels work, too, but I'm always a little afraid stamps are more likely to stick to paper than to cloth.

You can even layer towels if you're tight for space. Everything will still dry.

For flatter stamps, lay a towel on top of everything(as well as on the bottom) and put some phone books on top for weight. Do they still have phone books?

They do, but ours here are less than 2cm thick.

Not good for flattening anything really

Forgot all about them until now. Have not seen one in a long, long time. Brought back memories of the ones in phonebooths that were tethered by a cable that was always too short. And then there was the cleanliness of the booth itself....LOL

Sorry for the deviation from topic.

And then those self-destructing recordings people used to leave in them ...

Haha!!! Perhaps 15 years ago when they delivered the latest and greatest phone book for my area (major American metropolitan area, so phonebook is like 4" thick), I set aside my 'old' one for stamp drying. I still use it. If they were to deliver another phonebook, I'd throw this one out and use my current 'live' copy for stamp drying. Short of going out and spending money on blotter paper, phonebooks are the best for this task. And they are free. If you can find one anymore.

After all these years, my current one is getting all wrinkly from all the wet/dry cycles. I am too lazy to do something else, though.

Thanks for the thoughts everyone and the giggles about the phone books disappearance. I do like using a drying book - for me I have gotten way better results than when I used cloth or paper towels.


Just to reiterate, again today I used the friction method with my flat tongs to remove some hinges. Very effective and a new philatelic skill for me.

Bobby T

A bit of a broken record - and a question.

I succeeded in removing some ugly stamps from an old Lincoln Album with the tong rubbing technique.

But I am Curious, it it is heat that is lifting the hinge, why not try a hair dryer to apply the heat? I don't want to do that without hearing from others (kind of like the story I heard of a person who wore his hearing aid into the shower, then put it into the microwave to dry it!). Speaking of which, wouldn't the microwave work too? :)

Microwaves work by mostly heating up moisture/water. Putting dry stamps in there won't do what you (think) you want. No matter, I wouldn't put stamps in a microwave, whatever the goal. Also, I wouldn't heat them up with a hair dryer - I expect the heat from one is too extreme for a stamp.

I have heard people say that the friction of rubbing heats up the gum and loosens it (or something like that). I would like to put forth another mechanism --- I suspect that since the gum is dry and hardened that the continual back-and-forth motion of rubbing it may actually 'break' the glue on the back of the stamp. The heat may be a by-product of the rubbing and not the mechanism of separation. It may be something like bending a paper clip back and forth - eventually metal fatigue makes it break in two. Take my theory with a grain of salt - it is my own little personal theory, and I have no evidence whatsoever to back it up. I may be 100% wrong. And now I am pretty sure I will be told so by many.