Unitrade Postage Stamp Identifier

One of the most expansive postage stamp identifiers on the market today. This guide is an essential for any collector looking to identify their global stamps, or varied collections from different countries – a task that is made complicated due to the foreign languages, new and dead countries, and countries that have been taken over or invaded, resulting in a different stamp issuing authority.

There are two key sections to this 96-page identifier catalogue: 1) Inscriptions and Overprints on Stamps, and 2) Stamp Issuing Authorities, Former and New.

Brief History/Summary

This postage stamp identifier was created because of the many changes in the world in relation to postage stamps since the various similar reference works by other publishers were compiled. For beginning collectors, identifying the issuing authorities for the stamps they have in their possession is more important than the political decision to ignore the existence of countries comprising a formidable percentage of the world population.

Because of these political decisions, some of the major publishers of world stamp catalogues are obliged to ignore the stamps issued by some countries, hence their identifiers do not include these postage stamps. An attempt has been made to include the bona fide stamps of these countries and their overprints.

As not all inscriptions in postage stamps are in English, any authority which does not display the country name on its stamps in English is listed in more than one way. The country name appears in bold , while below that are the variations of the name as shown on different postage stamps. At the end of the inscriptions and overprints are alphabets and numerals from some of the many languages appearing on postage stamps.

Listings are brief notations giving the dates of major philatelic changes and changes in the country name. The periods during which the authority is known to have issued postage stamps is shown in brackets following the name. Most listings begin with a parenthetical mention of the country’s former name or political affiliation.  {e.g. ESTONIA [1918-40; 1991-date] (formerly part of USSR) }.