Everything about Postage Stamp Gum totally explained
In
philately,
gum is the
substance applied to the back of a
postage stamp to enable it to adhere to a letter or other mailed item. The term is generic, and applies both to traditional types such as
gum arabic and to synthetic modern formulations.
The use of gum was part of the original proposal by
Rowland Hill, and has been universal from the beginning. There have been a number of stamp types that were issued
ungummed, typically due to emergency situations when gum wasn't available, such as
Italy in
1944,
Cracow issue of
Poland in
1919,
Latvia in
1919. Other reasons have included lack of access to gum (the typewritten "
Cowries" of
1895 Uganda), extreme tropical climate (
1873 Curaçao and
Suriname), and intent to sell only to
collectors (as with the
US "
Farley's Follies"
souvenir sheets of
1933). The manual gluing-on of postage is such an extreme consumption of time (and "time is money" to businesses with a lot of mail) that these situations are always temporary.
Originally, gumming took place after
printing and before
perforation, usually because the paper had to be damp for printing to work well, but in modern times most stamp printing is done dry on pregummed paper. There have been a couple of historical instances where stamps were regummed after being perforated, but these were unusual situations.
On early issues, gum was applied by hand, using a brush or roller, but in
1880 De La Rue came up with a machine gumming process using a printing press, and gum is now always applied by machine. The gum is universally spread as uniformly as possible, but a
1946 local issue by the town of
Finsterwalde in
Germany used an economy process where the back of the stamp had a regular pattern of circular bare patches.
The greatest manufacturing problem of the gumming process is its tendency to make the stamps curl, due to the different reaction of paper and gum to varying moisture levels. In the most extreme cases, the stamp will spontaneously roll up into a small tube. Various schemes have been tried, but the problem persists to this day. In
Swiss stamps of the
1930s,
Courvoisier used a gum-breaking machine that pressed a pattern of small squares into the gum, resulting in so-called
grilled gum. Another scheme has been to slice the gum with knives after it has been applied. In some cases the gum solves the problem itself by becoming "crackly" when it dries.
The appearance of the gum varies with the type and method of application, and may range from nearly invisible to dark brown globs. Types of gum used on stamps include:
In recent years, the use of
self-adhesive stamps has become widespread. The first use was by
Sierra Leone in
1964, and the
United States tried it on a
Christmas stamp of
1974, although the experiment was judged a failure and not repeated for many years. Traditional gums remain in use, although differentiated by calling them
water-activated. All Israli postage stamps feature a 'water-activated" adhesive that's certified
Kosher.
For collectors, gum is mostly a problem. It is rarely of use in differentiating between common and rare stamps, and being on the back of the stamp it isn't usually visible. Nevertheless, many collectors of unused stamps want copies that are "mint" or "post office fresh", which means that the gum must be pristine and intact, and that'll pay a premium for these. While not so much of a problem for modern issues, the traditional way of mounting stamps in an
album was with the use of
stamp hinges, and some experts claim that very few unused stamps from the
19th century have not been hinged at some point in their existence. This means that old mint stamps are inevitably under suspicion of having been regummed, and a subfield of
forensic philately is the detection of regummed stamps.
Further Information
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