John Apfelbaum

Mail and Internet sales have long had an advantage relative to ordinary retail sales in that there was no sales tax charged for interstate sales. Buy a set of zeppelins from your local retailer for a thousand dollars, and it will cost you $60-$80 more than if you you buy them online. This is one […]

The 1970s were the halcyon days of philately. The inflation of the Carter years was fierce, and inflation rates for many years topped 10%. Add to this, currency controls in Great Britain had meant that people began to lose faith in money. Remember for a minute that money has no real value. It is a convention

  Fashion is as prominent in philately as it is in clothing or movies. Over the 150 years of our hobby many items that were once popular have lost collector appeal and some areas that were once neglected are now more popular. In the 1930s and 1940s precancel collecting rivaled  all of the mainstream US specialties

Stamps of the earlier eras were color coded. The United States first class postage rate stamps of the Nineteenth century were red-brown (the overseas stamps were blue). So were the first class postage stamps of Great Britain, Canada, and Austria. The reason had nothing to do with design or aesthetics. Red dyes were cheaper. Here’s

  The relationship between privately produced stamps and those for public use is a complex one, and how these stamps are classified has a tremendous impact on their future philatelic popularity. Thule has existed, at least on maps and in cartographers imagination, for over 2,500 years. The name really refers to the far north, and whenever early map makers

A century is a long time in history. In 1913, less than 2% of American homes were electrified. Virtually no one had a car; perhaps only a few dozen brave people had flown in planes. There was nearly no surgery; any infection was potentially life threatening. Life expectancy was thirty years lower than today. Smoking was pervasive,

Couple of years back a family brought us a collection that has been in their family for nearly 150 years. The collection had been started by their great-grandfather in 1860, carried on by their grandfather, and then their father who passed away last year at more than 90. Most collections that live through many generations in the

Individual hobbies attract relatively small percentages of the population and always have. Take chess—a cerebral game that attracts many of the same type of people as philately but with significantly more market penetration. The writers at the chess federation website bemoan the fact that though supposedly 600 million people worldwide know how to play chess,

Philately is the study and collecting of postage stamps. But mail carriage existed for over a thousand years before the first postage stamp was issued and through the history of our hobby many collectors have ventured back to collect these postal artifacts. These earliest letters that were carried are lost to us and probably were