YILDIRIM PHILATELY

The cursus publicus continued to function for many centuries, until the fall of the Roman Empire. Features of the Roman Postal service lingered on until the 10th Century.

Payment for Postage :

With the introduction of various postal services, different methods of payment for postage were established. Most involved a process of collecting payment form the addressee. All methods created accounting nightmares.

While some systems did allow prepayment by the sender of an item - it appears these were in the minority.

A study of history shows that the problems experienced by the various postal services over the payment of postage were studied by many with various solutions offered. Laurenc Koschier, a Viennese accountant proposed the introduced of prepayment for postage by postage stamp to the Austrian Government in 1836. His idea was not accepted.

An example exists of a letter sent in 1839 from an Austrian village called Spittal by a woman to her daughter at Klagenfurt. The letter has on it the usual postmarks plus an adhesive label with the number '1' printed on it. The father of the letter's addressee (Konstanzia Egarter) was the Postmaster at Spittal. It appears he used postage stamps to show that people had paid him for letters posted at his Post Office.

Various other means of prepayment for postage were established. Most involved the use of special prepaid wrapping paper.

Sir Rowland Hill:

If the writer Coleridge is to be believed, in 1836 Rowland Hill, then aged 40, was walking through a Scottish village when he saw the postman offer a letter to a young countrywoman: she refused it on the grounds that the postage was too much to pay. Rowland Hill offered to pay it for her but the young woman declined with thanks. The postman went away, carrying the letter which, since it had not been delivered, would be returned to the sender. Rowland Hill had watched what had gone on attentively, suspecting that the girl's refusal concealed a secret. Intrigued, he questioned her and taking him into her confidence she explained that her fiance lived in London and that they had arranged to correspond by means of signs on the back of the folded sheet of paper which took the place of a letter. Through these signs they were able to pass messages to each other without paying the postage, the correspondence being naturally limited to essentials.

A year later Rowland Hill published a pamphlet entitled Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability. As soon as it appeared, this pamphlet became the talk of the town. Hill proposed that inland letters should be subject to a prepaid postage.

The results of this reform were that on 6 May 1840 small pieces of paper with gum on one side and an effigy of the Queen Victoria on the other, were sold at post office counters for the very first time. The sale received very favourable public reaction. These were the stamps, penny blacks and twopenny blues, for prepayment of postage.

Postage stamps were introduced in other countries in the years indicated below:

The Growth of Philately:

There are two stories in cuirculation as to who became the World's first collector of postage stamps.

The first is as follows:

Stamp collecting has had a following ever since 1841, when the first person known to be interested in amassing stamps advertised in the columns of the The Times newspaper: 'a young lady being desirous of covering her dressing-room with cancelled postage stamps invites the assistance of strangers in her project'.

Others suggest:

Philately, as we know it today, was born shortly after the creation of the postage stamp by Rowland Hill in 1840. The first known collector was Doctor Gray, an official at the British Museum, who placed an accouncement in The Times in 1841, stating that he was looking for stamps. Following this, school children started to collect these stamps as a hobby.

As the number of collectors grew, and it became more difficult to obtain certain issues, such as first issues from each country, interest grew in the hobby. By 1860 there were stamp collectors in society's most notable circles.

The ceaseless issue of new stamps led to their classification, and the first catalogue, by Potiquet, was published in France in 1861, soon followed by others.

Later there appeared some interesting studies and publications on new issues including commentaries on philatelic events. The first of this type of publication appeared in December 1862, in Liverpool England, under the title of The Stamp Collector's Review and Monthly Advertiser. Today there are more than 1,500 philatelic publications not including booklets or circulars which are published from time to time.

Interest in increasing their knowledge and in acquiring stamps encouraged collectors to join together in specialised associations. The oldest known association is the 'Societe Philateliquell', which was founded in Paris in 1865, but which did not last very long. It was, however followed by other such as the 'Philatelic Society' of London (1869), the 'Societe Francaise de Timbrologiell' of Paris (1874) and the 'Internationaler Philatelistenvereinll' of Dresden (1877). These associations were the forerunners of many of today's societies (nearly a 1,000) most of which are members of the IPF (International Philatelic Federation) through national federations.

Exhibitions