Year of Issue

I was just sorting a big mix of Brazil commemoratives, getting them ready to fill up a stack of stockpages. They all have prominent dates in the design, "Brasil 2001" and so on. So as I sort them, they deserve a shout out for making life easy for their collectors. Right after that, I had a pile of Antigua topical sets with no dates, which wastes a lot of our time looking over 6 to 8 pages of catalog entries trying to visually find a match. 

Dates are so helpful for collectors trying to organize and locate specific stamps that I am surprised so few countries include them in their designs. Even if they don't care about collectors or convenience, you would think they would all want a date stamp as a kind of copyright notice. 

The most detailed year info was always China, which used to have the year at bottom left along with the set number and stamp number within the set, like "69.(4-4)". This is essentially an exact catalog number, as no two would ever be the same. Many countries do have tiny dates at the bottom, but as my eyes get older, I can't read the tiny dates from places like Czechoslovakia, and trying to sort a pile of stamps under a magnifying glass makes me nauseous. I can usually estimate the year of a stamp to within 5 years based on the style and how the designs for each country evolve over time. But that might still be a range of 500 or 1000 issues. 

The years are very helpful when making lots and mixtures, for making premium mixes of the newer issues and leaving the bulk 1960s and 1970s in the discount bin. Or for breaking down a huge project into a series of smaller projects, like listing the 1990s today and the 2000s tomorrow. 

Most definitive issues do NOT have dates, though, since they are meant to be printed as needed over longer spans of time. But commemoratives which are issued entirely on a specici date, really should have a year printed on them for sanity.