John Apfelbaum

Confederate States regular issues consist of fourteen Scott issued stamps that were issued over a period of four years during which the Civil War was fought. There are only two scarce stamps, and both of these issues occurred when the Confederate States Post Office decided to change issues in 1863. The new stamps were originally printed […]

Stamp theft, despite the scare stories that you sometimes hear, is really not much of a problem. We rarely have a customer inform us that his stamps were stolen and the APS’s stamp theft committee almost never sends out an advisory of a stolen collection. In the 1970’s stamp theft was more of an issue

Africa is a large continent, inhabited by scores of different ethnicities, speaking hundreds of different languages and dialects. By about 1850, partly through the interference of European powers, partly because of the ebb and flow of history (several large and successful African Empires had broken up between 800 and 1600 AD), and partly because climate

There is no more valuable substance in the world by weight and volume than original gum. Consider—the gum on a thousand mint US Ten Cent 1847’s if miraculously removed, commingled and weighed would total about an ounce. And the value of such gum on the stamps is $12,500 for each stamp according to the latest Scott

Hard as this is to believe, throughout the 1950s, the United States Post Office issued an average of ten stamps per year with a total face value of 30¢. Last year, there were over 150 issues with a $77 face value. When one is tallying up where collector dollars get spent, it is hard to avoid wondering

  One of the most remarkable economic trends of the last several years has been the beginnings of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. In the last few years, seven of the twenty countries worldwide with the highest GDP growth rates were in sub-Saharan Africa, and only Nigeria could claim that the reason that they were in

A few years ago, I read an article about how smaller town diamond merchants send their stock to each other by ordinary First Class mail. The article said that outside New York, the incidence of First Class mail going astray is nearly nonexistent. Apfelbaum’s sends out thousands of packages per year, mostly through the postal

One of the most interesting philatelic areas is Danzig, now called Gedansk. Danzig is a city, or rather City State, on the shores of the Baltic Sea between Germany and Poland (which was long ruled by Russia), and part of its philatelic charm is in the many issues that were created as political control bounced

The Lone Wolf was a detective series in the 1920s about a high end burglar named Michael Lanyard who helped the police solve crimes. The series was written by Louis Joseph Vance and was made into about twenty movies in the 1930s. I happened to see one recently on TCM entitled The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date. The plot