One page highlights the elegantly engraved 10-cent 1904 U.S. stamp commemorating the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. This was the first U.S. postage emission to show a map and details the territory bought from France. Both sides armed themselves, and it looked like they'd go to war, but in the end they didn't. Among the representatives of topographical maps is the oversized, richly colored 230-franc Comoro Islands issue from 1975, illustrating a mountainous perspective of Ile Moheli. Allan Lee collected every stamp that included a map of any significant detail.
People enjoy their charm and discovering the way different old maps depicted the world or a region.
In the past five years, AAs have been awarded to stamps issued by Albania, Mexico, and Uganda, among others. If anyone knows map-stamp collectors, it is Mark Larkin and Miklos Pinther. Pinther, in his professional life the chief cartographer for the United Nations, took over as president of The Carto-Philatelists in 1985. His devotion to the hobby grew out of one of his first jobs, as a cartographer working with the senior editor for research publications of the American Geographical Society. More than 40 years older than Pinther, that editor was Wilfred Webster.