As a print and/or mail professional, you can’t help but be interested in postage stamps. So I wanted to share a bit of background on how the stamp has evolved and where it may be headed.

Hand and Ink. The first stamps were actually hand-stamped to letters or postmarked with ink. Henry Bishop invented the first postmark or “Bishop mark” used in 1661 at the London General Post Office.

Adhesive Arrives. Rowland Hill was knighted in England for inventing the water-activated postage stamp in 1837. Hill also created the first uniform postage rates based on weight rather than size.

• Self-adhesive stamps were first used in tropical climates like Sierra Leone in 1964 to avoid the tendency for water-activated adhesive stamps to stick together in humid conditions.
• The USPS first used self-adhesive stamps in 1974 with Avery Dennison’s 10-cent dove weathervane.
• The British Post Office issued the first book of 20 self-adhesive stamps in 1993.
• By 2002, virtually all USPS stamps issued were self-adhesive.

A Collectible Future? For non-collectors, self-adhesive stamps are just as amazing an invention as sliced bread. But stamp collectors have a few issues with the departure from lick-and-stick varieties:

• Since self-adhesives are relatively new, no one knows how they’ll hold up long term.
• The USPS promotes a recycle value to stamps, but if these pieces are designed to biodegrade over time, what's the point in collecting them?
• The introduction of self-stick stamps also results in the loss of specialty collections, such as plate block or coil pair collecting, as well as too many varieties of the same stamp.

As a collector, I’m concerned about the stamp’s self-adhesive future. What are you thoughts? If you’re a fellow collector, what’s your favorite stamp or series? Please comment below.