1940 Pan-American On 1904 Pan-American Envelope - Philatelic Contrivance Or Postal History?

They simply issued stamps with the appropriate values without calling them such. Their system is different, that's why their stamps often said "postage and revenue" while in the US those were kept separate. My problem with philatelic is that the inexpensive items are looked down on by many collectors who get all excited when it comes to the more expensive clearly philatelic items. I hate the double standard.

Hi Geoff. The UK is as you say one of the few countries that has not created air mail stamps. They paid a cost for this in that they have had to use more time intensive methods to account for the extra fees they charged for air mail rather then simply track how many airmail stamps they sold and set aside the higher cost to go towards the extra cost of flying that mail. To use the same question, why did the UK bother to invent the penny black and penny red and all of their other stamps? They could have continued to use their previous system of tracking payments for each letter and card and marking them with rubber stamps or handwritten notations like they had been doing up until then. By creating the idea of a postage stamp and printing them up to affix to envelopes they could track revenues and more efficiently pay for carrying the mail. Using the argument that all airmail stamps are philatelic, one would then need to say that all postage stamps of any kind are philatelic creations since a post office could always just use rubber stamps and handwritten payment notations for the mail.

The accounting argument falls a little short.

The actual additional cost of transport by air was gross (collective) weight, not cover count ... the stamp count meant even less.

Stamp sales signal intent, but they do not determine usage and, of course, all sorts of stamps could frank a cover sent by air.

While the rate needed to be set to cover the cost, the occasional use of purposed stamps contributed nothing to the accounting.

My own thought is that 'airmail' stamps made manual sorting/handling of the mail a bit faster.

https://goscf.com/t/47132 ... Parcel Post Stamps on First Class Mail

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

We can agree to disagree :)

There had to be a way to raise the money to pay for airmail back then and create some kind of accounting system even if it was one that had a degree of looseness to it. Issuing airmail stamps was the way it was done. Yes, in most countries one did not have to use airmail stamps (there are some where it was mandatory) but it was normal that airmail stamps were sold and used for raising the money to cover the cost of the added speed to the mail service for that particular class of mail. Airmail stamps had a second purpose in that they advertised airmail and made it special and the "in thing to do" for many people thus causing the growth of that kind of mail which then allowed the post office to charge less for it. Most people today are too young to remember but air travel used to be very exciting and perceived as something that was special, elegant and classy. Up until as late as the 1960s or so people even used to get all dressed up in suits and ties, or fashion dresses, to go on an airplane trip. In the late 50s and early 60s there was even a trendy name for people who when on airplane trips - the "Jet Set". Sending your mail by airmail was considered deluxe and it got the recipient's special attention over plain old ordinary mail. Such stamps were not simple philatelic creations - they were made to fill a very specific and legitimate postal need to pay for the improvement of the domestic and international mail systems. And it worked.

I will happily concede the Glamor Factor ... after all, what could be more exciting than an airmail stamp being used to send something via airmail?

(Okay, well, just to answer that question, we had airmail etiquettes & decorative envelopes, of course.)

But "that airmail stamps were sold and used for raising the money" just does not work from an operational PoV.

Airmail stamps are postals, not semi-postals.

The contracts were signed, the flights scheduleds, and the minimum payments set (and sometimes paid) long before the first airmail stamps were sold.

The idea that any postal service ever had (or ever honored) some sort of escrow account that held revenue from selling airmail stamps to cover future airmail service costs strikes me as, well, unlikely.

But the Glamor Factor works for me. Airmail stamps were a great excuse for letting images of aircraft shove images of Dead White Rulers Current Crowned Head off of a nation's postage stamps, which is probably why one of the few countries in the world that did not issue airmail stamps is a country ever in thrall of its Dead White Rulers Current Crowned Head. QED?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

My sense is that the ease of recognition by postal staff is the stronger, non-philatelic reason for the use of specific air-mail stamps - presumably His Britannic Majesty had better-trained employees in that regard. Aided, of course, by the UPU requirement that an air-mail/par avion sticker be affixed to the envelope (although I don't know when that requirement came into force). But, looking at some of the material produced - those odd American homages to Prussian airships, the rather ridiculous French "banknote" - I still come down on an eye to the philatelic punter.

I apologise for once again taking a thread off course. The habits of Sterne without the talent.