||This article needs additional citations for verification. (May
2009)| Background to philatelic literature  Consider a letter
found pressed between the pages of an old book, sent from a
relative working in a remote part of the world. How did the
letter get from there to here? Was there a company mail boat
that carried it, or was there a remote town with its own post
office? Was the sender in an independent country, or a colony
too small to issue its own stamps? Why did the recipient's
country accept the expense of carrying the letter the rest of
the way, and if it didn't, how did it arrange to get paid for
delivering the letter? Come to think of it, how did the letter
cross the border? Philatelic and postal history research answer
these sorts of questions, and the results are then published in
a variety of books and journals. Philatelic literature is held
by stamp collectors and dealers, philatelic societies, and
general and specialist libraries. The holdings of the British
Library, for instance, are estimat