Edward Reiss age A, of San Francisco, CA

When did stamp collecting begin?

First of all, postage stamps had to be invented,, This happened in England about 120 years ago, The first postage stamps were sold in 1840, There was a black one‑penny stamp and a blue two‑penny stamp. There were letters in the corners of each stamp and a picture of Queen Victoria in the center, These first stamps were printed in rows of 12 with 20 rows to a page. The stamps had to be cut out with scissors, for they were not then separated with the rows of little holes which make it easy to tear them apart. This clever trick was invented later,

Today, there are perhaps 200,000 different stamps to be collected. In 1840, there were only two, But people liked these pretty bits of paper, right from the beginning. Every used stamp had a romantic tale to tell. It had traveled through the mails and carried a secret message` from one person to another, Many people wanted to save these pretty little messengers right from the start,

The first stamp collectors were really stamp savers. They saved lots of the one‑penny and two‑penny stamps in the same way that some people save bottle caps or match folders. Some of the first stamp savers used them for decorations.

In 1841, a young lady advertised for used stamps in a London newspaper, She said that she was using them to paper the walls of her dressing room, Friends already had given her about 16,000 of the pretty bits of paper, but she needed more to finish the job, All over England stamp saving soon became popular with fashionable ladies.

But stamp saving did not last long, though it was the granddaddy of true stamp collecting. In a few years, many countries copied England’s idea and printed stamps of their own,

People then could collect an assortment of different stamps. We are not surer but we think that true stamp collecting was invented by schoolboys. Boys are still perhaps the best stamp collectors, but nowadays the hobby also is popular with busy men and women, with kings and presidents.

Twenty years after the first stamps were printed, a schoolmaster reported that stamp collecting was popular with his pupils. One boy, he said, had a collection of more than 300 different stamps and this boy had figured that there were 500 different stamps in the world.

Collectors wanted to know about these different stamps so that they could make their collections complete, In 1861 the first catalogues or list of all the different stamps, was published in France, There were 1,200 of them Four years later a new catalogue listed 2,400 and the list has been getting bigger and bigger with every year,

Collectors now wanted to keep their stamps in order. In 1861 someone invented and sold the first stamp album, A collector could now study a catalogue to find the stamps he needed to complete his collection. He could use an album to sort and keep his stamps in neat order. Twenty‑one years after the first stamp was sold, stamp collecting was a well‑run, world‑wide hobby.