Try The Stamps Of Mexico
It is always interesting to speculate on future winners and losers in the stamp market.
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Adding Autographs Can Spice Up Your Collection
Most philatelists soon exhaust the specialty that they have chosen. Virtually any country can be 95% completed for between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. Most collectors never spend more than a hundred dollars for a single stamp and so the problem with our hobby is that collectors soon paint themselves into a
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Certification and Grading
Coin collecting has been dominated over the last fifty years by third party grading issues to the point where few serious numismatists buy non-graded coins. Eager grading services have tried to push into philately hoping to enlarge their fee base. So far it hasn’t worked. Some collectors have become enamored of graded stamps but most
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The Stamps of Antigua
Antigua was one of the first islands discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. For over 150 years after that native Caribs resisted colonization from the Spanish and as the island was small and had little to offer in the way of gold and silver, the Spanish left it alone. By the mid seventeenth century, the
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Africa is The New Growth Area
Geopolitics has always occupied governments. Today it’s the Middle East and Central Asia. In the late nineteenth century, European perception was that Africa needed to be partitioned and each country scrambled to increase their area of influence. Like much geopolitics today, this drive was ostensibly motivated by the desire to control natural resources (just as
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Collecting German States
Among the most interesting stamps that exist in our hobby are the stamps of the German States. What we call Germany today is a very recent political invention. The area of Germany was never part of the Roman Empire, and so the various Germanic tribes that occupied and conquered that area were never unified. As
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Revenue Stamps Of The United States
The first issue revenues of the United States are some of the world’s most attractive stamps and would be far more popular among US collectors if it wasn’t for the perf, imperf, part perf problem. These stamps were issued to pay taxes on everything from bills of sale to stock and property transfers and the
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Big Scarcer Stamps First
Broadly speaking, there are two types of philatelic items-those that are offered frequently and are readily available, even though their price may be substantial. And the second type of philatelic item is one that is rarely offered and of great rarity, even though the price may be quite modest. An example of the first would
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Why Albums Matter
One of the things that many collectors pay too little attention to is the albums that they put their stamps in. Nice attractive well made stamp albums cost money and many collectors are loathe to part with hard earned coin of the realm for anything but actual stamps. That’s fine if that’s what you want
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