Judging Stamp Condition

Most stamp collectors began their hobby just for the love and admiration of the beauty of a stamp itself. They’re like little paintings on a tiny canvass, duplicated thousands of times for millions of people to enjoy. Novice collectors especially are drawn to stamps for their subject matter, collecting stamps that often depict scenes of other hobbies of interest. Boxing enthusiasts, for example, may begin with a set of Joe Lewis stamps while American history buffs may enjoy the Lewis and Clark expedition series.

As your interest in stamp collecting grows, you may find yourself spending large amounts of time with your magnifying glass in one hand and your stamp and tweezers in the other. What are you looking at? What are you looking for? Beyond the beauty and intricacies of the design of the stamp itself, long-time collectors look for several important things. One of which is its grade.

Just as most of us went to school to earn those letter grades of A, B, and C, so too do stamp collectors grade stamps according to how well those stamps fit inside their borders.

Before we go any further, let’s go back, way back to those days in elementary school when your second-grade teacher taught you how to make a collage. Your teacher gave you one sheet of construction paper, and your job was to fill up the page with art. No white spaces, just pictures, stamps, colors, or whatever your medium was at the time.

Once complete, you were given another sheet of construction paper, a little larger than the first. On top of this paper, you pasted your collage, and the result would have been your artwork surround by a magnificent paper frame.

Some of your classmates pasted their collages right in the middle, giving them an even frame with four equal sides. If your stamp were a collage, then its border—the white space—would be its frame. When stamp enthusiasts go about grading stamps, they give A’s to those stamps with nice, equal borders around their picture. The better the border, the better the grade. You can use the chart below to judge the quality of stamps you have in your collection right now.