United States Self-Adhesive Stamps - Pro's and Con's:

Well, they sure are easier to put onto an envelope and they do save us some time tearing them apart from each other from the sheet or coil they came from (not to mention saving us some saliva).

BUT, and it's a big "but" - some of the recent American self-adhesive stamps are almost impossible to soak off their paper. These stamps either just won't come off, no matter what you do, or once off paper, they dry with big "cracks" in their surfaces, or when they come off the paper a layer of the stamp comes off too (leaving either thins or an entirely "thinned" stamp).

These are not good things for stamp collectors that are interested in postally used postage stamps. We wish the USPS would smarten up and use some type of adhesive that allows stamps to more easily be removed from their paper.

Some of the "problem child" stamps that are so very difficult to soak off paper include stamps of the 37 cent Constellations set (Scott No. 3945-3948), the 37 cent Summer Olympic Games stamp (Scott No. 3863), the 41 cent Purple Heart (Scott No. 4164), the 41 cent James Stewart stamp, the beautiful 26 cent Panther coil stamp, stamps from the popular Star Wars set, some of the Forever Stamps (Scott No. 4127) and the nondenominated Flag coil stamps (Scott No. 4133). There are more difficult to soak self-adhesive stamps, these are just some of them.