Some thirty-five years ago a customer called me from New York about a collection. He was from Nicaragua and had collected the stamps of that country all of his life. The collection was magnificent, in over twenty volumes, with thousands of stamps and covers. We negotiated a price, but any time you put five figure […]
Second chances sometimes work out in life, but they almost never do in philately. The 1930 Zeppelin stamps were issued in 1930 and their high face value during the Great Depression meant that many collectors had to forgo buying them and that many people who bought them could only afford one set and not put any away for
Philatelists are well aware of how interests change throughout life. The games of childhood give way to the pressures and duties of adulthood which in turn meld into the aspirations of old age. Most collectors have seen this. They collected as kids, found their interest in philately wain during their active work and parenting years and
The Battle of the Generations Read More »
Each generation of stamp collecting is defined by the wants of (what I call) movement collectors, that is the serious collectors of that generation, traditionally mostly older men who do most of the buying and selling in the hobby. These movement collectors are largely men who have gotten back into the hobby in middle and
During the Nineteenth century, there were two large economically developed nations that had large territories with disparate ethnic groups occupying them. One, the United States was rapidly growing west with many immigrants and local people emigrating to different areas. The other, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had numerous ethnicities and languages under one government umbrella with much internal
There are two basic types of predictions when it comes to philatelic investments. There is the country call where you use economic growth, demographics and education levels to make predictions about whether the general price level of a country should move. This is the rationale behind the predictions of increased growth of Chinese, Indian and Russian stamps
The Coil issues of the Washington-Franklin period Flat Press printings represent one of the greatest problems in all of philately. Few other areas have so many difficult to detect forgeries. The problem is this: The Washington-Franklins were first issued three ways-as perf 12 singles, as imperforates and as Coils, perf 12. The imperfs and the fully perforated stamps
Recently I went to see a collection of a life long customer of my father and my grandfather. Harry had died in 2005 but before that there was rarely an auction of ours that he hadn’t attended buying many different countries, but concentrating mainly on United States, Canada and Israel. Our records, which go back
The stamps of Israel are among the most popular of any country in the world. Israel is a major economic player, with a high per capita income and large foreign currency earnings which gives its citizens money to spend on hobbies. Further, Israel has a very well educated population, another predictor of philatelic popularity. And