What is hinged mint and never hinged mint?
Until a few years ago the most poular method of displaying stamps in an album would have been to use a ‘stamp hinge’, a small piece of paper gummed on one side which adhered to the album page and the back of the stamp. This is no big deal on used stamps which already have the gum washed off, but the effect of hinging is to disturb the gum on the backs of the mint stamps and now, with the advent of hingeless mounting systems, there is often a price premium on never hinged mint (“NHM”) stamps although both qualities are, in general, equally popular to collectors. It is often difficult to find NHM stamps issued before the 1950’s and most collectors will collect mint stamps from these earlier periods.
