The New York Review of Books is a literary magazine that began publishing in the 1960s. Issued twenty or so times a year, it carries book reviews and articles on contemporary issues written by a large group of the finest thinkers and academics of our time. The magazine is a bi-monthly journey into the world of ideas, […]
Some of the most popular US philatelic issues of the twentieth century are the Farley issues. They are Scott #753-771, and though avidly collected today, like many popular stamps, they had a checkered past. James A. Farley was a New York party politician who was instrumental in Franklin Roosevelt’s rise to the Democratic party nomination for
Herman Herst Jr.’s book Nassau Street is probably the most readable and enjoyable of all the philatelic canon. It is a series of stories and reminisces about philately in the 1930s and 1940s loaded with good anecdotes about many of the giants of our hobby along with reflections on where the hobby was in the
Philatelic Copyrights Read More »
Collectors and dealers of the 1930s and 1940s looked at the obstacles to increasing the popularity of US philately and decided that unnecessary complexity was off-putting to new entrants to the hobby. This feeling was created by four things. First, the classic one cent and ten cent 1851 with their different minor plate types being
Simplified US Philately Read More »
Unbeknownst to a mass of collectors, one of the major changes brought about in our hobby as a result of the Internet age is greater democratization. In the pre-1900 period, philatelic organizations didn’t count for much- there were few of them, and they had few members. The American Philatelic Society emerged as a powerful group in
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Confederate States philately has always enjoyed enormous popularity. The stamps are interestingly printed, served a real postal purpose, and the story behind the stamps has real philatelic appeal- large nation, rent by discord, one section withdraws from union to preserve the ability to own human beings as property, the other side fights to retain the
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The first country to issue Official stamps was Great Britain. It did so at the same time that it issued the first stamp, the Penny Black. But Great Britain was scooped in one major aspect of Official stamps by the United States Post Office, and that was in the issuance of Departmental Officials— Officials for
Great Britain Departmental Officials Read More »
The stamp business used to have what economists call high barriers to entry. It took a lot of knowledge, a lot of capital, and years of advertising and satisfying customers to build a good mailing list and a good stamp business. When the Internet became the preferred method of buying and selling in philately, there
It’s Still Difficult to Become a Stamp Dealer Read More »
Most philatelists, and especially most stamp dealers, see a dichotomy between traditional stamp collecting and the collecting of stamps on covers, which has come to be called postal history. Years ago, the best dealers and collectors of covers and postal history came up from the ranks of traditional philately. It was only after someone knew
Postal History vs Stamps Read More »