About twenty years ago, the Scott publishing company began publishing annually their Specialized catalog of worldwide issues to 1940. Originally, this was merely excerpted from their regular five volume US and Worldwide edition, but as the years have gone by, the editors have constantly added additional content each year so that the Scott Specialized has become […]
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Political and social scientists study stamp issues for clues to how governments view their history and evolution as societies. United States stamp issues are replete with historical themes and make much of our founders. Benjamin Franklin, because of his role as our first Postmaster, is on nearly a hundred different US stamp designs, and Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding
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The desire to collect is innate and probably relates to the gatherer instinct that differs humans from other primates. But in a world in which one can collect everything from antique barbed wire to Victorian pocketbooks, why do people collect stamps? The answer I think comes down to three factors- community, size and orderliness. First,
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The birth a new royal heir has made the philatelic presses roll. Mint sets, souvenir sheets, imperfs, and First Day Covers are being issued, and by the time the child has his christening, these stamps will number in the thousands. The birth of the new Prince is just another in a long line of British Royal Commemoratives
The first stamp dealing Apfelbaum was Maurice Apfelbaum who listed his occupation in the 1910 US census as “Stamp Dealer.” He began dealing when his son Earl was only four years old, and by the time Earl was ten, he had begun collecting stamps and was going around to dealer shops and bourses with his
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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
Most organized activities have their Halls of Fame, patterned after Cooperstown, baseball’s Hall of Fame. The American Philatelic Society, which has been the largest stamp collecting organization in the United States for over one hundred years, serves as the historical repository of philately in this country. The American Philatelic Research library is the largest useable philatelic
A hobby is not an academic discipline. Books and articles are written about hobbies, and millions of people may be devotees, but the origins of the hobby and the contributions of the earliest adherents of the hobby are not often remembered in philately. But if it wasn’t for the contributions of fewer than a dozen
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The opening of the Panama Canal proved the military dictum that by expanding your borders you need to further expand your area of influence in order to defend those new borders. Before the canal, ocean traffic between the east and west coasts of the United States was either by ship (unloading at either Panama or
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