The Case Against Preserving
Original Gum On Postage Stamps!
I bought some older stamps from a collector the other day. They were mint, never hinged British Colonials and the seller nearly freaked out when he heard that I would be mounting them in my albums with hinges!
When I began collecting stamps in 1955, using hinges was the norm. Somewhere in the mid to late 1960's, it seems, Showgard and Harris began to heavily push their Showgard and Crystal Mounts on the hobby, and mint, never hinged stamps (MNH) started to become an issue among collectors and dealers.
Herman Herst, Jr., the renowned philatelic writer and stamp dealer, referred to original gum as the most expensive commodity on earth. Collectors are paying for it dearly, and I believe they will be paying for it dearly, once again, as their stamps age and take on toning and as the mounts in which they are encased do damage to them.
H. E. Harris did not do the hobby any favors in pushing his Crystal Mounts. Yes, they probably boosted profits for the firm but most collections I see today that made use of Crystal Mounts are a disaster. Forty years later, it can be seen that these can destroy both the stamps and the albums of collectors who used them and actuality preserved nothing. Included among the disasterous results are glazed gum, glaze on the face of the stamps, damaged perforations from shrinking mounts, and yellow stains on album pages from the mounts' adhesive.
Then, there is the collateral damage that's caused by collectors who, in order to keep stamps from falling out of the mounts turn to using pieces of tape on each end of the mount. Over time, the rubber in the adhesive stains and damages both the stamps and the album. This is something dealers see all the time.
Fortunately, most users of these mounts had only common stamps to work with, so the stamps damaged in the process of using them are usually not a great loss to the hobby, but many a poor collector spent a lot of time and money thinking he was preserving his stamps and his collection, but actually destroying both!
When I left the hobby in 1973, Scott didn't differentiate catalog value between mint hinged and mint, never hinged stamps. A stamp was either mint or used, and valued accordingly. Today, beyond a certain point which can vary from country to country, Scott states that all values are for mint, never hinged examples and gives no pricing guidelines for hinged copies! When I came back in, it looked as if the hobby had been turned on its head for the sake of people with money-making gimmicks to promote and impose on stamp collecting such as the MNH craze and coin-like grading.
Gum darkens. It stains the stamps. It dries out so badly that the stamp paper actually cracks. Humidity causes stamps to stick to albums and stock books. In the tropics, fungus grows on stamp gum.
I have heard that in order to preserve them, some museums actually soak the gum from their mint stamps. There goes the value!