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There are few philatelists of the last few decades that have had more impact on our hobby than Varro Tyler. Tyler, who died in 2001, was tireless researcher and philatelic writer. Accomplished in both his professional field (botanical pharmacology, where he was a professor for many years at Perdue) and in the philately, Tyler’s main […]

Film and philately share a golden era with personalities larger than life, from a time that is quite different than our own. Jacques Minkus was such a personality. Minkus’s method of selling stamps was to open concessions in major department stores and at its most extensive he had over 35 different shops in many of the largest

Offices Abroad stamps are stamps that are issued for use in a foreign post office under a treaty with a foreign government. It allows the first country the right to maintain one of its own post offices on the territory of the second. Offices Abroad are usually the result of powerful commercial interests in the

Specialization in philately is defined as restricting your collecting from the general mass of issues to one specific area or stamp issue. Before WW II, most collectors were generalists. They collected the world. But then, a collector could afford to. There were only tens of thousands of stamp issues that a collector needed to acquire

The political history of South Africa is fascinating. Originally settled by the Dutch in the sixteenth century, South African areas long bounced back and forth under control of the Boers (as the native Dutch decedents were called), the British, who added South Africa to their list of imperial ambitions in the eighteenth century, and native

Philatelists of earlier generations grew up with a wealth of publications and literature that makes many of today’s collectors envious. The Internet has meant that one can read about stamps any time for free, but the quality of what is written has diminished significantly with the decline of print publications. Forty years ago, stamp collectors

Philatelic scandals come in three sizes—small, medium, and large. The work of Francois Fournier, prolific forger from Switzerland, ranks as a major philatelic scandal. He made hundreds of thousands of reproductions of many of the most popular and collected stamps in the hobby and defrauded, either directly or indirectly, tens of thousands of collectors out

While Francois Fournier was a philatelic facsimile maker whose work fools only novices or collectors who have never seen the real thing, Jean de Sperati spent his life creating forgeries designed to undermine the most knowledgeable philatelists. Even his book that he wrote Philatelie sans Experts (Philately without Experts) shows his prime motivation was the thrill of

Philately lacks drama. Maybe that’s why stamp collectors love a good scandal in our hobby. Though philatelists tend to differ in opinion on what constitutes a good stamp scandal, most will agree that a good scandal must be international in scope, affect thousands of collectors, and defraud collectors of large amounts of money. By these standards