In the internet age, researching your collection, or just performing basic research is made much easier. With the click of a button you can have access to many resources on the country or topic/theme you collect. The intent of this blog is not to provide lists of reference sites to clubs and societies (although many offer archived versions of their journals), but to provide you a short list (two sites) where your can expand your knowledge and find some extraordinary philatelic writing from the past. The advantages are that you can do the research from your house and the resources are free.

Page from Postage Stamps of Canada

The first site I like to look at is the Internet Archive. Using the search fuction and entering “Postage Stamps” and only searching texts, retrieved 267 results. The following is a screen capture of the first page of results:

An interesting title is the first in the list above. Peeps at Postage Stamps. Johnson, Stanley Currie http://www.archive.org/details/peepsatpostagest00johnuoft. Below are a couple of images from the book.

Using “Philately” as the search term produced 18 results including John Luff’’s “What Philately Teaches”, http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030135572. Which was based on a lecture the famed philatelist delivered to the Brooklin Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1899.

Another source to search is the project Gutenberg site at http://gutenberg.org/. I found a copy of “Stamp Collecting as a Pastime” by Edward Nankivell there.

With knowledge being power in so many aspects of life, and stamp collecting we should all use the free information that is on the net to its fullest.

Below are the links to the two sites referenced above:

Internet Archive – Postage Stamps Search – 267 results
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Postage%20Stamps%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
Internet Archive – Philately Search – 18 Results
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=philately%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts

Project Gutenberg - Stamp Collecting Search
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.html/?format=html&default_prefix=all&sort_order=downloads&query=Stamp+collecting