Mission statement

Stamp Encyclopedia is intended to be a concise reference. There are many more detailed sites on specific subjects, which we will try to link. While more detail will be added as time goes by, any country listing will be a descriptive list intended to help identify a time period and service type of stamps based on inscriptions, more detail than what's given in the Stamp Finder. It is in an advanced beta staten as of this writing.

Over time, detail can and will be added in associated articles, including information on types, plus forgeries. We have included and will continue to include some revenues and cinderellas. Stamp Encyclopedia' is not intended to be a freestanding worldwide catalog, but a useful supplement.

While in English, Stamp Encyclopedia does not follow either the Scott catalog or Stanley Gibbons schemes exactly. In researching this site, the arrangement of postal entities, particularly in Scott, has been arbitrary and was rarely updated over the years. It is rather odd that countries like Icaria, independent when they issued stamps but buried behind Greece listings, while another nearby island country, Crete, is treated as a separate entity from Greece. So the index in your favorite catalog is probably your best friend. But perhaps you will have more of an appreciation for entities buried in the back of the book. Of course, links can and will be made here, much easier than lifting physical stamp catalog volumes.

We have broken several potentially long pages into logical sections, like for China and Russia.

Images
Nearly all images can be clicked to give an expanded view. Humongous images are less useful than you think and would also render badly as capsule images on article pages.

Displayed images are not proportionate in size to each other. Page images are in standard box sizes for simplicity. Making every stamp the correct proportionate size would be impossible to do. Don't even try to measure from displayed images.

Country listings
We do have country articles with issue descriptions but these are intended to be a quicker reference over standard catalogs. Standard catalogs will have more detail; Stamp Encyclopedia will typically ignore varieties in most cases.

An important idea is to provide more and better/larger images than printed catalogs, for starters. The listings are intended as a shortcut basic identification and for rough dating of stamps, particularly for modern issues.

Stamp Finder
As for the Stamp Finder, yes, there is at least one online identifier using image recognition. The technology will probably be near perfect sooner than later, but is not there yet. There are too many variables, like cancels, bad centering and shades, that our brains can work out better than any current computer program.