John Apfelbaum

Most American stamp dealers try to do pretty much the same thing  to stock their business. They buy collection lots, usually at auction or from wholesale price lists. The way this works, when it is done properly, is to buy a  collection and then break it into a number of smaller units that appeal more […]

Open your newspaper or look online, and hardly a day goes by in which some new CNN or Bloomberg poll isn’t measuring some aspect of American life. How much time do we spend watching TV? Or exercising? Or intending to exercise as we watch TV? Nearly every aspect of our lives is polled and measured and

When I was an annoying teenager helping out at the Apfelbaum stamp store in the 1960s, every Saturday brought in the fascinating Ken Whittle. Ken was the kind of philatelist that you saw a lot of then. He was the archetype of the “solitudinous collector” (or SC). SC’s are people for whom philately is very important

Philatelic popularity began a long, measurable ascent about 1900. An historian can see the hobby taking off, and we know that the numbers of collectors increased because we see an increase in the number of philatelic magazines, in the quantity of different stamp albums, increased membership in collector societies and more stamp dealers. As these

One of the constants in history is the malleability of political boundaries. In America, we have become a bit inured to this fact because our own geography has been so steady, adding only Hawaii and Alaska to our country in the last century. But Europe is used to change, and nowhere in Europe has there been more

When collectors rail about excess new issue stamps soaking up their collecting budget and leaving them with little to spend on older stamps, they are only part of a long tradition of collectors who have bought stamps for their collections that were issued for reasons other than postal need. Some of the most popular stamps

Stamps were a hot hobby in the 1930s, and how hot is best illustrated by the fate of two United States Souvenir sheets that were issued three years apart. When the APS sheet was issued in 1933, the hobby was just beginning its Great Depression ascent. The face value of the sheet was only 12¢,

Cover collecting did not begin at the same time as did stamp collecting. Philately had its start in earnest about 1860, and, really, until about 1910, cover collecting was something collectors did when they didn’t have the time to wash the stamps they needed for their collections off the envelopes on which they had bought

If you like stamps and stamp history, working on old collections is one of the most interesting things that you can do. Couple of years back we purchased a collection that had been made in the 1930s and had been passed down through the generations with considerable care, if not interest, on the part of