Philatelic literature is written material relating to philately, primarily information about postage stamps and postal history.
Philatelic literature is generally divided into the following categories:
- Catalogs
- Periodicals
- Journals
- Newspapers
- Society newsletters
- Other - including stamp dealer price lists which include some stamp collecting articles and/or opinion essays
- Auction catalogs
- Books
- Background material - Usually not focused on postal or stamp collecting but containing reference material useful to stamp collectors. For example, currency exchange rates beteen European countries for a given year.
- Stamp dealer price lists
- Bibliography of philatelic literature - Including everything from a topic by topic list of just book or article titles to a short abstract of each and every item listed in the bibliography
Philatelic and postal history research answer these sorts of questions, and the results are then published in a variety of books and journals.
Perhaps the most basic sort of literature is the stamp catalog. This is basically a list of types of postage stamps along with their market values. The tradition was started by the stamp dealer J.W. Scott, who in September 1868, just 28 years after the introduction of stamps, issued the first of the annually-updated Scott catalogs. Some catalogs, especially the Michel catalog and various one-country catalogs, offer quite a bit of information going beyond the basic properties of each type.
Another common sort of book is the comprehensive "Stamps and Postal History" of a single country. These go beyond the basic date, denomination, and market price seen in the catalogs, explaining why particular stamps were issued, where and how they used, and more generally how the country's postal system worked in various periods. A good book will be profusely illustrated with must of the following types of information:
- Stamps
- Picture of the stamp itself
- Short description of the design and where the design came from
- Major and minor varieties of the stamp
- Perforation varieties
- Paper varieties
- Watermark varieties
- Printing errors
- Gum varieties
- Tagging varieties
- Typical postmarks used for the country
- Example covers (envelopes)
- Illustrating slogan cancellations
- Postmark types
- Town, city, or post office list with postmark types used, dates of use and relative rarity of postmark
- Postal markings
- censor markingss
- Special handling, air mail, etc.,
- Other
- Crash covers
- Crash covers
Other kinds of specialized work include comprehensive studies of postal usage in limited areas and times, perhaps mail in Montana Territory before it became a state, or mail carried by steamboat on the Mississippi, or mail from missionaries in Uganda before it became a British colony.
In addition to books, there are a great number of philatelic journals, again ranging from the general, such as the American Philatelist, which has been published continuously since 1887, to those for specialties such as the US "Bureau" issues (printed by the government itself instead of being contracted out), to newsletters for local clubs. Again, the audience being small, many journals only run for a few numbers and then fail. But one of those numbers may have had an especially insightful or informative article, and modern-day collectors must work hard to find a copy of that article.
Perhaps ironically, the scale and complexity of philatelic literature is such that it has its own journal, the Philatelic Literature Review, published quarterly by the American Philatelic Society.
To give some sense of the scale, between 1912 and 1917 William Ricketts published his "Ricketts Index", a bibliography of philatelic articles published up to that time (which we now view as a youthful and primitive period). The Index was 400 pages long, covering some 2,000 different journals. No one today expects to be able to find and index the totality of modern philatelic literature anymore.