The Challenges of Collecting Postally Used Stamps - Continued

Yesterday we posted on the topic of collecting postally used stamps and the challenges that used stamp collections present. Here's an example that many of you may be familiar with:

The United States Celebrate the Century issue.

This is a series of 150 different commemorative stamps issued by the US between 1998 and 2000.

They are Scott No. 3182-3191, and each of these different major Scott numbers was issued as a pane of 15 se-tenant stamps. They were sold in connection with the turn of the century, and this is a theme that we'll see with the stamps of other countries, too. Each pane of 15 stamps showed subjects from a specific decade in the 20th century, from the 1900s to the 1990s.

They are exceedingly difficult to complete as a postally used set.

First of all, there are a lot of them - 150 different stamps. That's a LOT of different but specific used stamps to try to find, considering that they're all the same set.

Secondly, they were issued in beautiful panes of 15 with informative text and background pictures. Many people who bought these panes kept them intact and unused because of their beauty and the history of the United States that they portray. Other people bought them strictly as a memento or keepsake of the passage of time and also the passing of the old millenium to the new. The panes those people purchased never got into the mailstream and still have not been postally used.

Third, because many of the stamps are topical or thematic stamps, many of the available stamps have been snapped up by collectors of those topics, rather than by collectors of United States stamps.

See what I mean about these being challenging to collect? We'll post another example tomorrow.