Almost thirty years ago Ron Daresh came into our office which was then located on Kennedy Blvd in downtown Philadelphia. His Dad had been a collector and he had the stamps loaded into the family home in which he lived in Charleston,West Virginia. I made arrangements to go see him and flew down there a […]
Every year in August the APS has its annual meeting and bourse. Lasting four days, the meeting begins with Board meetings for APS brass and continues with a dealer bourse on Thursday through Sunday. Various specialty societies have their meetings at the show and there is a large and well attended dealer bourse where a
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One of the most interesting of the “classic” countries to collect is New South Wales. Now part of the Australian federation, New South Wales (NSW) is Australia’s most populous state and was an independent country until 1901 when the seven component states of Australia joined to create one country. The stamps of NSW have always
The growth of Asian philately has undermined traditional thinking about where new collectors come from. The traditional model has been the evolutionary model- children (usually boys) introduced to the hobby and collecting in their youth become re enamored with stamps in middle to old age. This paradigm has described the traditional collecting arc in the
The relative popularity of mint and used United States stamps has been constantly changing during the history of our hobby. The first generation of collectors had little relish for mint stamps. Philately was hardly more than a diversion then and few collectors had the seriousness of purpose to seek quality let alone mint. These collectors
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The United States Post Office announced last month that they were planning to close 3700 post offices nationwide. For many years the post office has floated large lists of post office closings only to back off at the last moment and close considerably fewer than were on the original list. Still, given the decline in
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The Society of Friends are a small religious group many of whom settled in the Philadelphia area in the 1680’s and today run many of the better secondary schools here. Better known as Quakers, they believe that “there is that of God in every man”, in nonviolence, and in the inherent good in every person.
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One of the most interesting countries to collect is the Dominican Republic. The first issues are crudely printed from domestically produced plates and the major varieties of the first thirty or so stamps are not design types but paper varieties. Philatelist have traditionally treated major paper types as grounds for a major catalog number. The
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Cognitive dissonance is a concept in psychology which states among other things, that the disconnect between what we do and what we believe creates discomfort and to deal with that internal discomfort we alter our perceptions of what we do to be more in line with what we want to believe about ourselves (that is,
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