French Colonies
Among the most popular stamps in philately, French Colony issues fall into three main types
The Apfelbaum Stamp Store
Earl Apfelbaum opened his first stamp store on the Tuesday after Labor Day in 1930. Earl had been a part time dealer, and when his first business, in the clothing trade, failed at the beginning of the Great Depression, he and his father Maurice pooled their resources, their philatelic inventory, and their knowledge and opened
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Stamp Circuits
Stamp Circuits were once one of the most popular methods of sale. They began in the late nineteenth century largely as part of club meetings. You see old circuit pages and even circuit books on French and English printed pages going back as early as about 1880. Collectors would hinge duplicates to these pages and
Plate Blocks
One of the most idiosyncratic aspects of US philately is the collecting of plate blocks. Many countries have marginal plate numbers in the selvages of the sheets of their printed stamps. Most United States stamps that were printed before 1894 had plate numbers in the selvage, put there by the private printing contractor who printed
Stamp Journals and the Direction of the Hobby
One of the great changes in our modern world has been the decline of specialty periodical publishing. In philately, the result has been very dramatic. Thirst years ago, the top ten stamp journals in the United States had nearly half a million subscribers. Today the top three (and because of the Internet there are only
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France
France came a bit late to stamps, perhaps because issuing stamps for the prepayment of postage was not a Gallic idea, and so the French were resistant. Still, it was nearly ten years after the success of the Penny Black and the benefits that prepayment of postage conferred before France issued her first stamps in 1849. She
1898 TransMississpii Issue
The 1898 Trans Mississippi appeared to be a commemorative set issued to honor America’s expansion into the west. But its issuance served another purpose. It was hard to see at first why the 1898 Trans Mississippi set was made. The 1893 Columbian Exposition issue was widely criticized as being redundant in design and appearance and
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Philately’s Greatest Era
There are three factors that make a fine philatelist and a fine stamp collection. They are the same factors that the first collectors dealt with, and the Modern period has allowed collectors to face these issues in a new way. The first factor is access to material. From the first, philatelic material was widely diffused.
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The Third Reich
Some countries are so vast philatelically that collectors break them down into more bite sized units. Some philatelists try to collect all of the German area, but with over a million collectible varieties by the Michel catalog, the latest Lighthouse specialty albums for this country runs to over 25 volumes and has a retail value