No Gum Brazil Of Late 1960's

A while back I bought a mint Brazil collection and I was 'playing' with it today. I noticed that many of the stamps of the late 1960's had no gum, and I thought maybe I was being taken for a ride. I referred to my Scott Catalogue, and discovered that many stamps of that era were No Gum As Issued.

Does anyone know WHY Brazil was issuing stamps without gum in the late 1960's??? Did they FORGET to put gum on their stamps? Was there a Brazilian gum shortage? Had Carlos tipped over the barrel of gum? Did the president decree that stamp gum was no longer needed? Was there a massive earthquake/plague/flood/meteor that took out the gum factory? This inquiring mind wants to know!!

Same reason Laos, Vietnam, and China did for so many years: in tropical climates the gum will soften, and panes will stick together and mold will grow on the stamps. Many of these countries tried glassine interleaving between panes of gummed stamps first, but that didn't stop the problem, so they just stopped gumming their stamps entirely.

More modern gum formulations (not based on gum arabic) do not stick or mold so easily, nowadays that gum is used instead.

Brazil issued a set of definitives in 1996 depicting fruits, which were issued without gum. No idea why, but it's the only issue of that era issued with no gum. Scott 2626N-U.

codehappy - of course you are right. I hadn't considered that possibility. Over the years, I have seen tons of 'tropical gum' stamps. Many even had the stuck-to-glassine look to them.

I feel sorry for all the people that buy no-gum stamps, hoping to just lick-and-stick. How inconvenient! I can picture all kinds of Brazilians driving around with little bottles of Elmer's glue in their glove compartments.

Mootermutt, feel more sorry for the person who finds all his postage stamps stuck to each other when he wants to use them, that is more of nuisance because you have to buy more. presumably people in hot sticky regions learn what to do and accept this as the norm.