Postage Stamp Values - Part I


We get several emails every week asking how much a particular stamp is worth.  Sometimes the person doesn't know much about it - not even what country it's from - but others know at least something about the stamp and usually describe it by country, denomination and color.  The person who knows the stamp's specific Scott Catalog number is much more rare.  Many of the people sending these inquiries aren't able to send a scan of the stamp because they don't have a scanner and/or don't know how to send a picture as an email attachment.  Unfortunately, there's just not much we can say about a stamp's value if we don't know which stamp it is and we can't see its condition.  But that's another story.

The value of old postage stamps is a frequent question and will probably never go away.  The question almost always comes up when someone inherits or finds a relative's collection and naturally wants to know if the stamps are worth anything.  The answer, much to many peoples' surprise, is often "probably not a lot."

Valuable vintage stamps are in many peoples' stamp collections, and more of them are found around the world regularly.  But just because a stamp is old doesn't mean it's rare, and it doesn't mean it's valuable.  As a matter of fact, most of the time, it's not. 

If a stamp is quite common, it doesn't matter how old it is - if it's common it won't be rare (obviously) and it won't be valuable.  Not even if it's 150 years old.  In other words, age ALONE is not relevant to the value of a stamp.  The only reason there are more old valuable stamps than modern valuable stamps is because some older stamps are more scarce:  over time stamps can easily be damaged or lost, so fewer of these older stamps are likely to still be around.

Like everything else in the world, the value of any postage stamp is determined by supply and demand.  If a stamp is rare and there is a high demand for it, it will be valuable, whether it is old or not.  But most stamps, even those from more than 100 years ago, were issued in enough numbers that they will never be scarce.  In truth, most valuable stamps are either scarce varieties or stamps that were issued in smaller quantities because of low anticipated demand, such as the high value stamps of many stamp sets.

We'll post more on this important stamp collecting subject tomorrow!