Editing Overprint (section)

== Surcharges ==
The term "surcharge" in philately describes any type of overprint that alters the price of a stamp.<ref name="Williams">Williams & Williams, p. 258.</ref> Surcharges raise or lower the face value of existing stamps when prices have changed too quickly to produce an appropriate new issue, or simply to use up surplus stocks.

Any overprint which restates a stamp's [[face value]] in a new [[currency]] is also described as a surcharge.<ref name="Williams"/> Some postal systems have resorted to surcharge overprints when converting to a new national monetary system, such as [[Postage stamps and postal history of Sierra Leone|Sierra Leone]] did when the [[Commonwealth of Nations|British Commonwealth]] converted to [[decimal currency]] in the 1960s.<ref>{{Cite book |title=Guide to Stamp Collecting |last=Klug |first=Janet |year=2008 |publisher=HarperCollins |location=New York |isbn=9780061341397 |page=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780061341397/page/45 45] |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780061341397/page/45 |url-access=registration }}</ref>

Stamps have occasionally been overprinted multiple times. A famous example of repeated surcharging happened during the [[Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic|German hyperinflation of 1921–1923]]. Prices rose so fast and dramatically that postage stamps which cost five or ten [[pfennig]]s in 1920 were overprinted for sale in the values of thousands, millions, and eventually billions of marks.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://ingrimayne.com/econ/EconomicCatastrophe/HyperInflation.html |title=A Case of Inflation |author=Schenk, Robert |year=2011 |publisher=[[Saint Joseph's College (Indiana)|Saint Joseph's College]] Economics Dept. |access-date=3 September 2011 }}</ref>
<gallery>
File:UK-Stamp-1873-Pennystamp Overprinted to Halfpenny.jpg|[[Postage stamps and postal history of Victoria|Victoria]], 1873: Penny stamp overprinted to new value of halfpenny
File:Guatemala 1881 Sc17.jpg|[[Postage stamps and postal history of Guatemala|Guatemala]] 1881: 1 centavo surcharge on 1/4 real
File:Ceylon-UK-Stamp-1888-Double-Inverted-Surcharge.jpg|[[Postage stamps and postal history of Sri Lanka|Ceylon]], 1888: Stamp surcharged by a "double inverted" overprint
File:Uruguay 1892 Sc100.jpg|[[Postage stamps and postal history of Uruguay|Uruguay]], 1892: 1c [[Provisional stamp|provisional]] surcharge on 20c issue of 1889–1901
File:Stamp Siberia 1919 50k.jpg|[[Postage stamps and postal history of Russia|Russia]], 1919: Tsarist 3-kopeck overprinted to new value of 50 kopecks for use in [[Siberia]]
Image:Germany278.jpg|[[Postage stamps and postal history of Germany|Germany]], 1923: Five thousand [[German Rentenmark|mark]] value overprinted to two million
</gallery>