Listings from the Scott New Issues Update in the July 2016 Linn's Stamp News fall into the following popular topical collecting areas.

The stamps on a 1937 souvenir sheet seemed to provide more questions than answers. A study of related Romanian issues led to a better understanding of that country’s turbulent history.

It is kind of amazing how one little stamp can incite a collector to go off on not just one but several tangents. Here is a good example.

The new stamp-issue listings from the Scott New Issues Update in the June 20, 2016, Linn's fall into the following popular topical collecting areas.

Let’s face it: Some of the stamps in our albums are mundane in appearance and others are breathtaking. But how many people have been converted to the stamp-collecting hobby simply because of the image of an exotic stamp?

Often during “man on the street” interviews, when the questions pertain to geography, the person is likely to be clueless. Not if they're a philatelist.

The new stamp-issue listings from the latest Scott New Issues Update fall into the following popular topical collecting areas.

Collecting covers as postal history is a lot of fun, and it also can be quite challenging. The fun of covers, especially difficult ones, is in working out where they went, how they got there and why.

If you have been collecting stamps for a while, you will have noticed that most of them are printed on white paper. Every once in a while, however, you might find a stamp that seems to have been printed on colored paper, and this makes it stand out among the other stamps that live in your stamp albums.

Examples of stamps from Europe and Asia that do not have country names were addressed in previous Stamp Collecting Basics columns (March 21 and April 4 issues of Linn’s). Fewer stamps were issued without a country name from the Americas and Africa, and these two continents will be discussed in this column, beginning with the stamp in the first illustration.

The new stamp-issue listings from the Scott New Issues Update in the April 18, 2016, Linn's Stamp News Monthly Edition fall into the following popular topical collecting areas.

It’s surprising how many of the world’s postal administrations have issued stamps without the country’s name. So many, in fact, that it is taking more than one of these columns to cover all of them.

Stamps printed without a country name, especially from countries using a different alphabet than ours, present a definite challenge for stamp collectors. Having a stamp identifier book nearby is helpful. Linn’s Stamp Identifier is extraordinarily useful, though even with that handy reference it sometimes can take a while to be able to answer the question, “Where is this stamp from?”

The new stamp-issue listings from the Scott New Issues Update in the March 21, 2016, Linn's Stamp News Monthly Edition fall into the following popular topical collecting areas.

The 2015 Canada Stamp Program contains up-to-date information about stamps and postal stationery from Canada Post.

The 2015 U.N. Stamp Program contains information about all of the United Nations Postal Administration products released during 2015, including those honoring World Poetry Day and Endangered Species.

It may not take long for a new stamp collector to become discouraged both with stamp-collecting terminology (often a language all its own) and stamps that are difficult to identify. Let’s face it: It isn’t always easy for longtime collectors, either.

The new stamp-issue listings from the Scott New Issues Update in the February 15, 2016 Linn's Stamp News Monthly Edition fall into the following popular topical collecting areas.

In Linn’s issue of Jan. 4, a number of free resources for stamp collectors were presented in this column, and that theme will be continued here.

The Scott Worldwide Stamp Cost chart tracks the face value and catalog value for stamps of the world from 2002 to 2014. Click on a year to see the data for that year.