Every country has sub specialties that are avidly collected by internal collectors but which foreign specialist collectors of those countries never really warm too. As an auctioneer you can see this in bidding patterns and where certain stamps eventually sell to. Ordinary Great Britain stamps in our auctions sell to Americans, Canadians, Britons and Europeans. Plate […]
August 1 marked the day that the United States Postal service was technically in default on its pension liabilities. If it were a private company, it could be taken into court and liquidated. Numerous proposals have been made on how to reconfigure the USPS so that it could be either a profitable private business or
The Problem with the Post Office is the Problem with American Politics Read More »
We are so used to enormous technological change impacting our lives that we have become quite casual about it. But major technological change was more unusual a century ago and no technology ever seemed as liberating as the first manned flight. Soaring like the birds has been the aspiration since Icarus and the Wright’s feat
Now is the time to begin your specialized collection of Olympic stamps. The popularity of this thematic flows in quadrennial cycles, usually peaking a few months before the games themselves. Olympic philately is one of the most interesting and long established of the topical philatelic areas with the first set being issued by Greece for
Generations of men and women have made many of their best friends from people they had met at stamp clubs. Shared interest is one of the preconditions of becoming friends. It gives you a basis to start conversations and a pleasant fallback when things get dull. Stories of stamps that you have and how you
I am not nearly clever enough to do the Sunday New York Times Cross Word Puzzle. But being a stamp collector I am pretty much the go to person in our home for exotic geography, oddball Presidents, and significant events for say the year 1948. And beyond the pleasure of acquisition and completion this is
Philately and Shared Cultural Knowledge Read More »
Wars require the movement of troops and material, and this requires communication, which means mail. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who were sent to fight and die in France at the end of World War I were sent with two postal issues all of their own. Soldiers like booklet stamps as they can be
The Two Cent AEF Pane Read More »
There are three major types of rarities in philately. There are errors-stamps like the Airmail Invert that were supposed to be one way but through printing mistakes came out another. Most are rare and, since most errors were known from the beginning of production, they are rarely found unidentified in collections. The second type of rarities
There is no country that is collected in a more specialized way than are the stamps of Austria. Most specialists of other countries seek cancels and covers and blocks and all kinds of specialty items. But Austrian specialists go far further. Austrian specialty catalogs list paper varieties along with varieties listed by thickness as measured by a micrometer.
Ulrich Ferchenbauer Read More »