Many stamp societies make their journals available online

Most stamp societies publish journals or newsletters for their members. These publications are often available online.

A few groups make all their journals available to everyone, but most restrict the publications to members only. There’s also intermediate access: Newer issues are only available to members, but older issues can be viewed by anyone.

Some societies provide only one sample issue so that a visitor can see what the publication looks like, and others provide only selected articles from the journal.

One way to find these online issues is to do a web search for “philatelic newsletters” or “philatelic journals.” I would not recommend using “stamp” instead of “philatelic” in the search term unless you are also interested in rubber stamps.

The American Philatelic Society offers an extensive listing of specialty societies. The nearby illustration shows the APS page where you can select which category you are looking for, list all the societies, or enter the name of the group you might be looking for.

The American Air Mail Society only provides an index for its publication, the Airpost Journal. However it also offers a 23-page album for all United States airmail issues for downloading, as well as an article about collecting airmail stamps.

The Stamp Insider, a publication of the Federation of New York Philatelic Societies, provides all issues from 2003 to date for downloading as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file or viewing online with a page-flipping application. You can also find 15 videos related to stamp collecting at this site.

In addition, information about each of the 28 stamp organizations in the federation is provided.

One of the APS entries under the topical category is the CartoPhilatelic Society. This site offers a four-page sample article, “Oh, What a Relief,” from the journal, the New CartoPhilatelist. Select publications from the main menu, click the New CartoPhilatelist, and scroll down to see the sample article link.

Under the category of resources, the site includes a link to a new-issue blog that is well illustrated with recent stamps showing maps.

Stamporama provides the Rambler, an eclectic publication with issues available from 2000 to 2002 and 2013 to date.

The site also includes an exhibits page. A three-page exhibit shows odd-shaped stamps. There’s also an active discussion board, which had about 25 messages posted in the previous 24 hours before my visit.

The Mathematical Study Unit offers a sample copy of a recent issue as well as several articles about mathematicians. The sample issue is shown on the general information page. The articles about mathematicians appear on a separate page.

If you decided you want to join any of these groups, membership information is provided on their websites.

If you subscribe to the Scott eCatalogues, you can access many of these sites directly from the catalog.

Look at the table of contents page, and click on the page number next to “Information on Philatelic Societies.” You will see an alphabetic listing of many stamp groups. Web sites and e-mail contact information is provided for most of these groups. Click on the highlighted blue entries either to visit the site or send an e-mail to the contact person.

If you have the print editions of the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue,  you can also use these listings, but you will have to type the addresses into your computers rather than just click.

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