ipdesign

What Can Be Done: Victoria is a very specialized country. The first 60 catalog numbers comprise only two stamp design types – the differences in the stamps coming down to denomination, color, paper, perforation and watermark. This is what traditional philately, in the era before pervasive new issues, was like. Remember, in the 1920’s, when […]

I’m not much of a TV watcher. When I’m in a bit of a masochistic mood, I’ll turn on the Phillies game or the Eagles and watch them lose. But most evenings, after dinner and an hour or two with my wife, I go to my reading room and read novels and history and politics

There has been enough stamp writing books and journals to fill a large library. The American Philatelic Research Library in Bellefonte, Pa has thousands of published volumes, and tens of thousands of journals and monographs. But, though one can find books on the Aerograms of Australia or on the forgeries of Saxony, one of the

What Can Be Done: Luxembourg is a relatively unpopular philatelic country. Writers have ascribed this to Luxembourg’s small internal market (population only a bit over 500,000). Iceland however is far smaller, as is St Pierre and Miquelon, yet their stamps are far more popularly collected than the stamps of Luxembourg. No, it’s not population or

What Can Be Done: Greenland is a very popular country. It combines well designed stamps with a responsible issuing policy. Before WWII, Greenland was a territory of Denmark, so Greenland has only issued stamps for seventy years. There are no pesky nineteenth century stamps that are priced out of reach. Only the first set is

US First day Covers began in earnest about 1909 and, more than anything, were the brain child of a young Philadelphia collector named Philip Ward. Ward went on to become a major US collector and dealer (in those days of the turn of the last Century, poor liquidity in the stamp market forced many prominent collectors

What Can Be Done: Western Australia is one of the more interesting of the Australian States (and indeed of the entire British Commonwealth) to collect. The reason is that the designs are completely different from any other British colonial issues, the stamps incorporating the Swan of Western Australia. Most countries, following the lead of Great

Innovations are largely incremental. When phones first became portable, they were simply portable phones. It took Steve Jobs (and better technology) to add cameras and computers to phones, so that most of us could walk around with more computing power in our pockets than existed worldwide thirty years ago. The fact that they are also phones

What Can Be Done: San Marino is one of philately’s glamour boys. It is a tiny country, the 3rd smallest in Europe, and has a very small population. But San Marino has issued over a thousand stamps going back to the 1880’s. Its popularity has to do with its remoteness. Collectors, especially those of the