ipdesign

Postal subsidies usually take the form of governments paying off their postal service’s annual deficit. This was always seen as socially desirable as governments encouraged the commercial, social and academic interests of its country by underwriting postal service. It is rare for this to go the other way around and have the postal service underwrite […]

The conventional wisdom is that it is wealth and education that determines the rate at which a nation collects stamps. I just came back from Ecuador where I visited the Galapagos Islands and Quito and am fascinated but how little philately seems to have caught on in that country. By world standards, Ecuador is average

Electronic communication has little variable cost. Once the lines are laid, or the satellite launched, electrons fly for free. Not so postal communications where distance travelled matters. Sending a letter from Philadelphia to one of its suburbs costs far less than mail from Philly to Nome, Alaska. World wide postal services began eliminating distance surcharges in

After a tepid 2009, the stamp market was pretty good this last year. Our EBay selling customers reported good activity for the most part. Business was not great week after week, but there were very strong weeks for EBay sellers and the market for commercial grade stamps from popular, well collected countries improved. The auction

Robberies of stamp collections used to be a real problem. In the 1970’s a large ring of stamp thieves were caught. They had an APS membership directory with them that they were using to figure out who to knock off next. When I was on the Board of Directors of the APS in the early

Those of us who came of philatelic age in the post WWII era always dreamed of owning the one cent Magenta British Guiana #13. It had panache. The rarest stamp in the great Ferrary collection that was sold in Paris after WWI to help pay for Germany’s war reparations, the stamp had the highest realization

One of the most interesting philatelic areas is Confederate States. When the Southern States seceded from the Union in 1861 over the issue of whether they would be allowed to continue to own human beings as slaves, the eleven seceding states (Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas,and Missouri) quickly

We have a great Buy it Now sale up. You can find it on our website. Listed are over 6300 lots of fine philatelic material of all categories and descriptions. There is wonderful US and British and all sorts of Foreign specialty items and well its hard to imagine any philatelist not being able to

Few people today understand the technical revolution that the invention of the postage stamp produced. In many ways, stamp invention had as great an effect on 19th Century communication and commerce as computers and electronic communication has had on ours. Ease of contact facilitated business and social interaction. Business was enhanced. Newspapers and book readership