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The 2011 Scott catalog has begun “quality pricing” for the first time. The main listing is still for a Very Fine example of each stamp, as it has always been, but now there is a center section that prices most US stamps in different numerical grades. This is not an advance and Scott has lost […]

Geopolitics has always occupied governments. Today it’s the Middle East and Central Asia. In the late nineteenth century, European perception was that Africa needed to be partitioned and each country scrambled to increase their area of influence. Like much geopolitics today, this drive was ostensibly motivated by the desire to control natural resources (just as

The Federation International de Philatelie sponsors an international stamp show once a year where all of the winners of scores of national stamp competitions compete for the international grand prize. Every ten years the exhibition is held in the United States and in 1976, the first year that I was working full time in the

This is the punch line to a rather sad joke. A waiter is waiting on a group of sour customers. Everything is a problem, nothing is good enough. At the conclusion of the meal the waiter, instead of asking if everything is alright, asks if anything is alright. We live in angry times or at

A little more than

Much of the history of stamp collecting is really the history of stamp collecting in the German speaking part of Europe. Deutschophones collect stamps at a far greater rate than any other cultural unit. At one time in Germany nearly everyone had a stamp collection with collectors numbering in the millions. This was from an

Fifty years ago, if you had to draw a picture of the average stamp collector, he (and it was a “he”) was an older white male who had a general world wide collection, maybe a US mint collection and definitely a collection of US Plate Blocks and First Day Covers. Today if you were to

I recently came across an old box of early US stamps that had been assembled in the 1920’s by an attorney. I questioned the family carefully. Had their Grandfather been a stamp collector? Not to their knowledge. Good. Why did he throw 1920s mint commemoratives in this box? The reply was that he sent out

Over the weekend my wife and I went to see an Indie called “Get Low” starring Robert Duvall. It was a good movie if you like character driven films with most of the action happening in inner space. At one point there was a scene where one of the characters is shown working on his