What do you collect as a philatelist - part 1

Is that a silly title ? Could be if you are an experienced philatelist, but for a layman; it is not always obvious. Some people have been known to collect garbage eventhough the intention originally was collecting something of value.

The Used Stamps or Cancelled Stamps.
First thing first. The most obvious thing to collect will be the stamps themselves. As a child usually people begin collecting stamps, most of them will be collecting used stamps from the envelopes. Okay, not so much nowadays with the e-mail as competitor, but people still use letter and the stamps are still being used.
There are various degree of stamps condition when people start to collect them. The cheapest one would be the used stamps which you get from the letter that come to your house.
These kind of stamps normally is called used or postally used stamps and they are always covered with the cancellation from the post office.
There are 2 different kind of cancelled stamps; the first one is cancelled by the post office because it has been used as a postage stamp and the second one is called CTO (short for Cancelled To Order). CTO means that the stamps have never been used as a postage stamps. Most CTO will still have the original gum in the back of their face. However, in term value, CTOs have the lowest value if not considered worthless.

The New Stamps
If you have a little bit more money, then you can afford to buy the stamp from the post-office. The New Stamps is a stamp which has never been used as a postage stamp; they have an original undisturbed gum in the back and no cancellation on their face. They could be old stamp from 1890s, but if the 3 conditions above are met, then they will first be considered as new stamp.
This category is the second biggest category of philatelic material that are collected by the philatelist. They are easy to get (you only need to have some money) and relatively not very expensive as well. However, please bear in mind, there are some very expensive new stamps as well.
You can get the new stamps from the post office or from the stamp dealers.

First Day Cover (FDC)
First Day Cover or normally people call it FDC is a new unused envelope with a stamp attached to it and the stamp is cancelled with a special cancellation. The FDC is normally issued by the postal office to commemorate the issuance of a stamp. The cancellation on the FDC will be date when the stamp was first issued. So in general, if the post office is issuing 10 new stamps, it is very likely that they will issue 10 different FDC as well. Most of the time, the FDC never goes through the mailing system, so the stamps on the FDC is considered as CTO.

Souvenir Sheets (SS)
Souvenir Sheets is very similar to stamps. At the time of the issue, the value or the cost of purchasing the SS will be the same as the value declared on the face of the SS. Compare to the stamps, the SS normally have a much bigger size because other than its main design in the form of the stamp, an SS will have some background picture related to the stamp itself. For this reason, most of the SS will have a higher denomination than ordinary stamps.

Minisheets
Very similar to ordinary stamps, except the number of stamps on the sheets are much smaller. An ordinary sheet of stamp might consist of 100 stamps, whereas a minisheet might only have 10 stamps. The drawing on the minisheets normally the same as the ordinary stamp sheet.

Maxicard
Maxicard is a postcard with a picture of the stamp on the part that normally is used for writing. Most maxicard will be issued at the same time with the stamp. Postcard will be considered as a maxicard if they are issued by the post office and have the exact same picture as the issued stamps. Postcard which is issued by a private institution can not be considered as a maxicard even if they have the same kind of printing.

The above listing are all the philatelic materials which are generally found on the stamp dealer and being collected by general philatelist and will have some sort of value at a later date.
There are other material which are more specialized and being collected by advanced collector. In order to collect these other material, a good knowledge of philatelic material is required.

The Value of Your Stamps

There are few terms that you need to understand and know in term of stamp collecting. These terms refer to the condition of the stamps when you look at them
The condition of the stamps can be summarize into several categories, i.e.: Very Fine (VF), Fine (F) and Very Good (VG), Good (G), Acceptable (A). There are other terms that are used and those will depend on the area and the general agreement of the local custom. These term are generally used on the stamp catalog to give the value of a certain stamp.

Basically there are 5 parameter that will be used to give a judgement of the stamps condition.
Gum Condition.
How well the condition of the gum on the back of the stamps. The early issue stamps are using material that is easily damaged by air humidity. Also the method of displaying the stamps in the past are not always in the best interest to keep the gum part undisturbed, therefore damaged gum are quite normal to find in the old stamps.
Colour
The colour condition of the stamps itself should be good. A lot of the older stamps are printed by using inks that will bleed in time. They are mostly printed in single colour as well. The modern stamps are printed using full coloured printing machine and more resilient inks.
Centering
The location of the designed picture should be centered. Also the distant to all side of the stamps should roughly be equal.
Paper/Material Used
The paper or material used for producing the stamps should be free of defect. Defects means that the paper is not perfect and it is very subjective appraisal.
Cancellation
As a general rule, a cancelled stamps worth less and less attractive compare to the un-cancelled stamps. However, there are some cancellation which are in demand because they happened only once in a lifetime. For example a cancellation of the millenium will be in demand, specially when they are done from a rather special place as well.

The combination of the all the above parameter will generally be used to assess the value of a certain stamps. However, it does not mean that all the stamps that fall out of the above categories are bad stamps. Infact, there have been a lot of cases that a certain stamps with a misprint or printed with the wrong colour or printed on the wrong paper or produced with different original gum command a higher price in the market. The word to remember about the philatelic material is scarce. The more scarce the item, the higher the prices (provided that the scarce component are legitimate component). Creating your own scarce stamp will not increase the value of your collection.

They are people who specialize in collecting these "error or mistakenly printed" stamps. There is no limit as to the type of errors. The most commons error will be the printing error. The printing error could come in the form of shifted colour, inverted picture, wrong colour, double printing and a few other mistakes.
And then of course the perforation part of the stamps. Some printing company forgets to perforate the stamps. There are some imperforated stamps issued by the postal department, but these are specially imperforated stamps which are normally issued to commemorate something. The "forget to perforate stamps" normally only happen during the process of finishing the stamps and certainly not on purpose.

Most of these "error stamps" are more expensive than the normal stamps. There is no open market value like the ordinary stamps. Some of these "unique stamps" are mentioned in the normal catalog, but in general they are not even mentioned because not everybody know about it.