Our hobby has had two great quality evolutions in the course of the 150 plus years that people have collected stamps. The very first collectors, who began saving stamps about 1860, just twenty years after the first stamp was issued, had no interest in quality. They often scraped stamps off envelopes for their collections, rather than soak them. Any piece of a stamp would do. The first quality paradigm began about 1880, when the first generation of collectors was cashing out their stamps, and the second generation was beginning to collect. These second generation collectors were more erudite and critical in their collecting. The quality terms “Good, Fair and Poor” began to be used to sort resold stamps into different categories.
As the second and third generation of collectors matured and exited the hobby, collectors, beginning about 1920, began to demand even more stringent quality standards. This was driven mainly by the fact that by 1920, stamp production had reached its apotheosis. By 1920, quality of new issues was always high, and stamps were always well centered and nicely gummed. Collectors, schooled in buying their stamps at the Post Office, began to use the same criteria when buying older stamps for their collections. New quality terms were needed to accommodate this new collector vision and the terms “Very Good, Fine and Very Fine” became the terms of the day (ironically, Very Good came to mean a stamp with small imperfections). With some modifications, these are the same terms that we use today. (Today, we’ve added Extremely Fine and Superb at the upper end.)
Beginning about 1980, there have been two attempts to evolve a third generation of quality standards and that is graded quality certificates. Begun by a group of coin dealers about 1980, the graded certificate movement has had its adherents, but has never caught on. The reasons for this is that stamp collecting is very democratic and collectors like to be able to evaluate stamps for themselves rather than have a grade set in stone for them. Too, the internet has made it so that very few stamps are now sold without a scan, making centering apparent to every buyer, a concern graded certificates sought to alleviate in the days before widespread computer use. And the last reason that graded quality standards never caught on is that the cost of each certificate is high, eating up a big percentage of the cost of the vast majority of stamps. Most collectors would rather have stamps than certificates and have voted with their money accordingly.
My sense is that the grading standards that we use now, and which have been largely intact for nearly a century, are the ones that will continue to be used as our hobby continues to mature.
