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Self-Stick Stickiness

Saving one of the old lick-and-stick stamps for your collection mint or unused was easy: You 
put it in a stockbook, envelope or album, and as long you kept it dry, everything was fine.

But self-adhesive stamps are another matter: Like flypaper in a Laurel and Hardy comedy, once 
you remove the stamp from the backing sheet, it'll stick to ANYTHING -- paper, the table top, 
your fingers. And once that happens, it's no longer in "mint condition."

A full sheet of stamps is no problem: You store it just as you got it from the post office. 
It's single stamps and blocks that are difficult.

You can put them on a different backing sheet, but the feeling now seems to be to keep stamps 
on their original backing sheets. 

Practically all U-S stamps now are self-adhesive. It's what the public wants. Only a few 
issues for special uses or for collectors are still water-activated. 

There's no "OFFICIAL" way to collect self-adhesive stamps...but eventually a consensus will be 
reached.

I'm Lloyd de Vries of The Virtual Stamp Club. For more about stamps and stamp collecting, 
visit  virtual-stamp-club-dot-com


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