One of my favorite stamps when I was young stamp stamp dealer was the 5 Franc Napoleon from France. I liked it because it was nicely printed but mostly because it cataloged a lot of money, and it was easy to recognize. And it had a story. Five francs in France in 1860 was a lot […]
France 5 Franc Napoleon Read More »
The carnage of WW I produced the kind of revulsion that should have prevented other wars. Hundreds of thousands were killed over battle lines that moved only yards, gas was used for the first time producing horrific deaths and maiming, and there were mortality rates that wiped out nearly 1/3 of the military age male population in France.
League Of Nations Read More »
A customer wrote to us asking for Proofs and Essays of the United States Bank Note period to spice up his specialized collection of this area and was surprised that, since so many of the items only catalog a few dollars each, he was having such difficulty finding them. This got me thinking about what
The Great Specialty Sort Read More »
Shades and their nomenclature are arbitrary. And people’s perception of color is as well. The average person can see about one million different shades. Some people with a genetic mutation can see up to one hundred million. My gut feeling is that Scott uses about 2500 different shades as names in their catalog, though such generic terms
Pink and Pigeon Blood Pink Read More »
Virtually every stamp was originally sold in perfect condition. And yet, when you look at dealer offerings of rarer stamps, by far the vast majority are damaged in some way, with small thins or creases or no gum leading the list of defects. And the rarer and older the stamp the more likely it is to be
The rare stamp market has not really moved much in the last thirty years. The British Guiana stamp sold in 1980 for $935,000 and the million dollar mark has only been broken a few times since then. Price realizations at the very top of the market are notoriously unreliable too, with many “sold” rarities really not
Rare Stamp Prices Read More »
Everyone associated with our hobby has their favorite terms and their least favorite ones. Many collectors find fault with the term “never hinged” mostly because it doesn’t describe what is really meant. People seeking “never hinged” stamps want perfect gum so that a stamp with disturbed gum that is “never hinged” is not NH at all.
Anyone who was a Cub Scout or a Boy Scout in the 1950s and 1960s received a free monthly copy of Boys Life magazine delivered in the mail. The magazine was for boys 7-17 and offered light reading, projects and an array of stamp collecting ads. Companies like Jamestown and Kenmore and Mystic and H
Our nation has become far less regional than it was forty years ago. People were born, raised and died in the South or the North East and many people never moved very far from where they were born. Today, many of us are transplants or from families that have moved. And millions moving south when they retire has also
Regionalism in Philately of Yore Read More »