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Women and Stamp Collecting

  As children, girls collect somewhat less often than boys. But as adults, women collect stamps far less frequently than do men. And when they do collect, they tend to do so less avidly and more idiosyncratically. In the lists of competitive stamp exhibitors, women make up a very small percentage of Gold Medal winners,

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Certification and Grading

Coin collecting has been dominated over the last fifty years by third party grading issues to the point where few serious numismatists buy non-graded coins. Eager grading services have tried to push into philately hoping to enlarge their fee base. So far it hasn’t worked. Some collectors have become enamored of graded stamps but most

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The Stamps of Antigua

Antigua was one of the first islands discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. For over 150 years after that native Caribs resisted colonization from the Spanish and as the island was small and had little to offer in the way of gold and silver, the Spanish left it alone. By the mid seventeenth century, the

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Africa is The New Growth Area

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

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Collecting German States

Among the most interesting stamps that exist in our hobby are the stamps of the German States. What we call Germany today is a very recent political invention. The area of Germany was never part of the Roman Empire, and so the various Germanic tribes that occupied and conquered that area were never unified. As

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