About Hughes Stamps

Hughes Stamps strives to provide an affordable way for a stamp collector to build, expand or upgrade his or her collection. It features an innovative ordering system (presently in its final beta stage; so I ask for your patience) and offers stamps from hundreds of countries in top-notch condition and at very attractive prices. It is presently a one person operation, but ordering from Hughes Stamps should be as easy, or easier, than ordering from one of the big name dealers.

Hughes Stamps
Charles Hughes, Proprietor
20428 Marquette Street
Burney, CA 96013
Phone: 530-335-4597

A more complete story of how Hughes Stamps evolved follows.

The Hughes Stamps story

Hughes Stamps was created by myself, a fellow stamp collector, to fill a vacuum encountered while building my own worldwide stamp collection.

I was relying mainly on stamp mixtures and packets to get the stamps that I needed, but once a country was started I found it increasingly difficult to add stamps to it. Many of the stamp sets were incomplete, or some of the values were damaged or unattractively cancelled. No stamp dealer seemed to want to sell individual stamps from sets, and buying mixtures to get the needed stamps was a hit-or-miss (mostly miss) proposition. I tried trading my duplicate stamps for awhile, hoping to pick up a missing stamp here or there, but found this method to be frustratingly inefficient also.

I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy just the stamps that I need? I kept on the look-out for a dealer who would provide such a service, but over several decades of stamp collecting I only remember seeing one dealer who tried to fill this niche. Unfortunately, the prices charged were on the high side--over catalog value in many cases, even for relatively common stamps.

Around 1990 I started my own stamp business that offered individual stamps from sets as well as sets and single-issue sets. I decided to offer my stamps through custom price lists, because I only had one copy available of many stamps and I didn't want to frustrate my customers with sold out notices.

This approach had three main drawbacks. First, the custom lists added a great deal of labor to the process. Second, the lists could only offer a limited number of the stamps available for a country requested. Third, because once the list was sent to a customer, the stamps were reserved for that customer making them unavailable for others until an order was placed or the list expired.

Still, despite these drawbacks, the business was a modest success. The third drawback would have become more of a problem had I continued to grow the business, but I was also offering desktop publishing services for local businesses at the same time. Demand for these services boomed, and I decided to cease all advertising for the stamp business. I continued to fill orders for a few dear repeat customers who stuck with me for the next couple of years despite my inexperience and limited offerings, but gradually it died out altogether.

A number of years later, a family emergency forced me to curtail and finally cease altogether my destop publishing business. By the time the emergency was over, the internet had blossomed to become a cultural phenonemon.

The internet's widespread acceptance seems to offer a way to overcome all the drawbacks listed above. Selection can be made from my entire inventory, no stamps have to be taken out of circulation while on a reserved list, and unnecessary steps are eliminated. All this should enable me to offer better service to you.

Programming for this site took much of 2002 to accomplish, longer than I expected. I think this site is fairly unique because it uses no online database, even though tens of thousands of individual items are listed. I'd be happy to share more technical details on the general approach I used to those who might be interested.

I've also gone through my stamp inventory and employed much stricter standards on the postally used stamps that I sell than I had previously. This is a tricky area. The Scott Standard Catalogs give conflicting guidance on how used stamps should be graded. It states that Fine-Very-Fine stamps "will not have a cancellation that detracts from the design" but the illustrations that it uses for Very Fine and Extremely Fine used stamps clearly have detracting cancellations. I have opted for their written guidance. As a result, many interesting cancels have been eliminated from my stock, but at least you will have a pretty clear idea of what to expect when you order a used stamp from me, and your stamp collection should have a cleaner overall appearance because of it.

Hughes Stamps will now be my primary focus, and I plan to devote as much attention to it as is necessary to keep its standards of service high. I invite you to give me a try to fulfill your stamp collecting needs.