The phone call goes like this. The guy collected as a kid for a number of years and hasn’t touched his collection in years and has some questions. And every time he gets one of the jargon words right you can hear a bit of pleasure in his voice. He collected plate blocks and First […]
Baby Boomers Childhood Collections Read More »
People began writing about stamps almost as soon as they began collecting them. The first stamp magazines, really little more than dealer price lists with articles, were issued before 1840 and by the 1890s the London Philatelist, the precursor journal of the Royal Society of London, was actively publishing monthly scholarly philatelic articles. By 1900,
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Most stamp collectors are married men. In fact, if you had to pick the person who was at the exact center of the philatelic demographic in this country you would have a married man in his sixties with grown children. He would be more or less happily married. He and his wife share nearly everything together. They have children,
One of the great profit centers for mail order companies has always been their postage and handling charges. The idea is a good one for the business involved but not so great for the customer. Why mail order companies should be able to get away with charging for postage and handling is kind of odd.
Free Postage and Handling Read More »
The story of the 1893 Columbian Exposition issue is well known. World’s Fairs, which was what the Columbian Exposition was, were a big thing until the advent of television and theme parks (in fact the last great US World Fair, the 1964 World’s fair in New York, had the first version of the “It’s a Small
Collecting Used High Value Columbians Read More »
Philately has been a pretty consistent hobby in terms of popularity since its earliest days. Stamp collecting is not for everyone. It appeals most to intelligent, reflective people and goes well with a splash of introversion. Philately began as a diversionary hobby, more of a game to see how many different stamps you could obtain, though by
Spikes in Stamp Popularity Read More »
Philatelic history suffers from the fact that stamp collecting is not an academic discipline. Academic history is a constant process of evaluation and reevaluation of sources, previous historic writing and conventional understandings. Several of the latest award winning histories of the early American Colonial period that I have read present quite a different spin on the
Philatelic History Read More »
Libraries had a problem. Books and periodicals continue to be printed at an ever increasing pace, far faster than space can be built and afforded. What could be done so that a library could maintain as complete a collection of books as possible, continuing to acquire new material and without having to get rid of old.
Go to Ebay and run through fifty or so better US commemoratives that are offered for sale from the 1893-1930 period. This was the era in which the United States produced our stamps through a printing process known as flat press printing. In flat press printing most of these issues were printed in large sheets of
Ubiquity of Reperfing Read More »