About this site
A site about the history of postage stamps. It starts where stamps started, in Britain: with the embossed duty stamps that taxed legal documents from 1694, whose cypher labels are thought to have inspired the first adhesive stamps, and with the Penny Black of 1840 and the thirty years after it. From there it turns to the history closer to home: the Habsburg monarchy with its offices, provinces and field post, 1850–1918, and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1945, with the two wartime states that took its place and the souvenir sheets made abroad.
Every issue carries a short history, written from the sources listed under it. Where a stamp has been photographed it is shown beside its entry, and a forgery is always labelled as one. The British parts are there to show how stamps began, so they are a selection of examples rather than a full catalogue of the country.
The last two columns place each stamp in one of five value bands rather than quoting a price: common, low, medium, high, exceptional. The bands step by a factor of ten, and are worked out from StampWorld's catalogue prices as its archived pages quoted them – so they are catalogue rather than market levels, and they date from the last years StampWorld was online. No individual figure is reproduced here. Mint on the left, used on the right.
Catalogue structure and data: StampWorld, reconstructed from the Internet Archive's snapshots of it. The pieces StampWorld never listed — the embossed duty stamps, the Czechoslovak exile sheets and the Carpatho-Ukraine stamp — are entered by hand from the pieces themselves, and their pages say so.
Michel numbers (Austria, Hungary) and Pofis numbers (Czechoslovakia, the Protectorate, the Slovak State): Arnošt Suder, Katalog poštovních známek, AS Publishing, 2025 and 2026. Where StampWorld gives a perforation, paper or watermark variant a number of its own, it shares the other catalogue's number, with the variant's letter where that catalogue has one. Scott and Stanley Gibbons numbers for Great Britain are compiled from published tables and dealers' descriptions; where the sources disagree, the number is left out.