Rare Stamps of the World, Country by Country

Outside the United States, five issues dominate the record books, and each is rare for a specific, documented reason rather than general age.

• British Guiana, 1856, one cent magenta. A single known example, printed locally when a shipment of stamps from London ran late. Sold for US$9,480,000 at Sotheby's in June 2014 and again for US$8,307,000 on 8 June 2021.
• Sweden, 1855, three skilling banco in yellow. One known example of a colour error; the value should have been blue-green. Sold for 2,880,000 Swiss francs at David Feldman in Geneva in 1996.
• Mauritius, 1847, "Post Office" one penny and two pence. Five hundred of each were printed from a single plate; around 27 were recorded as surviving as of 1981. An invitation cover bearing both sold for roughly US$11.2 million at Christoph Gärtner in June 2021.
• Baden, 1851, nine kreuzer printed in green. Should have been pink; the green ink belonged to the six-kreuzer value. Four are known, three used and one unused. The unused example made €1,314,500 at David Feldman on 3 April 2008.
• China, 1897, Red Revenue small one dollar surcharge. Revenue stamps printed in London were overprinted for postal use when the Coiling Dragon issue was delayed. The small-character version was stopped after two panes of 25; 32 examples are recorded.

German material is the most common thing in European albums and the most commonly overestimated. Between August and October 1923, during the hyperinflation, the post office overprinted existing stocks with revaluations running from 5,000 marks to 2,000,000 marks, because prices were moving too fast to design new stamps — a domestic letter cost 20 marks in January 1923 and tens of billions by December.

Those overprints were produced in enormous quantities. Most individual 1923 inflation stamps trade for pennies, and a shoebox of them is not a windfall. The same is true of most ordinary Deutsches Reich issues of the 1930s and 1940s.

What does carry value in German philately is narrower: the Old German States before unification (Baden, Bavaria, Saxony, Thurn und Taxis), genuine errors with certificates, correctly franked inflation-period covers showing a rate that matches the date, and scarce overprint varieties that specialists can plate. The date on the cover matters more than the stamp: an inflation cover is interesting when the postage matches what the rate actually was that week.

Stamps inscribed Ceskoslovensko turn up constantly in mixed lots. The country issued stamps from 1918 to 1992 and most of them, especially the 1950s to 1980s commemoratives, were printed in large quantities for a collector market. Ordinary used examples are worth well under a dollar each. The scarce Czechoslovak material is early: the 1918 Hradcany issues with plate flaws, the Scouts' express stamps of 1918, and early covers.

The same shape repeats elsewhere. Soviet-era Russian commemoratives are common; the scarce Russian items are imperial-period covers, zemstvo local issues and the 1922 consular airmail overprints. Polish rarities sit in the 1860 first issue and the Second World War occupation period, not in the post-war sets. Mexican value concentrates in the nineteenth-century district overprints, which have to be checked against the district and date tables. Chinese value sits overwhelmingly in the Qing and Republic periods and in the Cultural Revolution issues that were withdrawn, not in ordinary People's Republic commemoratives.

The one reliable rule across all of these: a stamp printed to be sold to collectors will rarely be worth much, and a stamp printed to carry mail and then thrown away sometimes is.

Start with the country, not the value. Many inscriptions are not the modern English country name: Helvetia is Switzerland, Magyar Posta is Hungary, Suomi is Finland, Nippon is Japan, Espana is Spain, Sverige is Sweden, Ceskoslovensko is the former Czechoslovakia. Currency units are a second clue — kreuzer and groschen point to the German states, skilling banco to nineteenth-century Scandinavia, centavos to Latin America or Portugal.

Once the country is settled, find the issue and catalogue number, then measure perforations and check the watermark before looking at any price. Our guide to identifying a stamp's country and issue lists the common foreign inscriptions in one place.

Photograph the stamp and the app identifies it, which is usually the fastest way past the reading problem.

Every stamp on the record list above has been forged, and the forgeries outnumber the originals by a wide margin. Reprints, facsimiles sold as album fillers in the nineteenth century, regummed stamps, repaired margins, added or removed overprints and faked cancellations are all routine.

Two habits protect you. First, treat any stamp that appears to be one of the great rarities as a copy until a recognised expertising body says otherwise — the odds are overwhelmingly on that side. Second, never pay a rarity price without a current certificate that names the stamp and the certifying body.

Our guide to spotting a fake stamp covers the checks you can do yourself with a magnifier and a watermark tray.