Many self-adhesive stamps, particularly those in the United States, Australia, and the Great Britain "Machins" with security cuts, cannot be removed from their mailing envelope with normal soaking (in water).

During The Royal stamp show in St. Catharines (2009) a video was made showing the principles of removing difficult self-adhesive stamps using two non-water products. .WMV video (Bestine): part 1 (18Mb) .WMV video (aerosol): part 2 (20Mb) Peter Butler can be reached at pbutler@ilap.com

This has been written about several times by Peter Butler, FRPSC in The Canadian Stamp News over the past couple of years and in the October 2010 American Philatelist.

The four articles appearing here, are copies of the articles as submitted to CSN for his bi-weekly column, Grassroots Philately. They are not word-for-word what appeared in the newspaper but are his original submissions. The CSN editors have made some changes to the text in each of the four articles, as they have every right to do.

• The Saga of Soaking Self Ads (HTML | Word doc)
• Unpredictable World (HTML | Word doc)
• Freshen up self adhesives (HTML | Word doc)
• Chemical removal of stamps (HTML | Word doc)

Peter Butler's October 2010 American Philatelist article:

• It's Like Magic / Removing Self-Adhesive Stamps from Paper (PDF / 541k)*

Peter Butler can be reached at pbutler@ilap.com

* Courtesy of The American Philatelist, magazine of the American Philatelic Society, October 2010