Thematic stamp collecting along conceptual lines has never really caught hold. There was a great gold medal collection making the rounds of the APS Champion of Champions shows several years ago entitled “Murder” where the collector sought to portray how murder was shown on stamps from individual murderers to genocide (such as the Holocaust). But […]
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Of the major worldwide powers in the philately era (that is, since 1840), the least imperialistic has been the United States. Great Britain and France had between them hundreds of imperial philatelic entities. Germany was a big player, and even Italy, which had more of an appetite for conquest than the digestion, had fifty or
One of the most remarkable economic trends of the last several years has been the beginnings of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide last year, seven of the twenty countries with the highest GDP growth rates were in sub-Saharan Africa, and only Nigeria could claim that the reason that they were in this group was because of
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It is always interesting to speculate on future winners and losers in the stamp market. Philatelic popularity is ever changing. In 1900, foreign postal stationery cut squares were a serious specialty that looked likely to continue in popularity. Today, almost no one collects them. In 1950, US precancels were avidly collected; today there are few fans.
As you sit around this Thanksgiving with family and friends waiting for the turkey dinner, no doubt you have been wondering which American holidays are collected thematically and which aren’t. There are five main work holidays in the United States
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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Here’s a link to an article published in the December 2013 edition of the British magazine Stamp & Coin Mart.
Prices and the value of money are difficult to evaluate over time. Readers of Victorian novels know that in the late Nineteenth Century an income of about 150 Pounds a year was the minimum needed to live as a gentleman (Trollope says tartly “an embarrassed gentleman, yes, but a gentleman”). That was three Pounds a
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