We have available a completely intact dealers stock in three cartons. Largely post 1940 it has things like errors (mostly coil imperfs) and even a recalled Legends of the West sheet in the original packaging. The postage has been carefully counted out by book and is over $ 14,000. And the price is only $9795, postpaid. This […]
United States Dealers Stock Read More »
What is striking about the first philatelic issues of most countries in the Nineteenth Century compared to the later issues is the small number of printing varieties that exist on first issues compared to the subsequent issues. Specifically, US #1 & 2 have a few minor shade varieties listed by the catalogs and several very minor
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The United States Post Office announced last year that it was ending the previous policy that has guided postal emissions for the last century and that people no longer had to be ten years dead before they could be suitable for commemoration on US postage stamps (previously, the only exception to this policy was recently
Who Will Be First? Read More »
Every country in the world grapples with the issue of what images should go on its stamps. And this was never as important as when the first stamps of each country were issued. The essays for the first stamps of Great Britain (which were the first stamps issued) show a variety of choices from elaborate
Years ago at one of the more popular Philadelphia stamp clubs there was a man named Bob. Bob had a pretty fair philatelic knowledge, though he wasn’t nearly as capable a philatelist as he thought he was. But that wasn’t Bob’s biggest problem. No, he would come to the major club meetings and brag about what
Oakwood, Oklahoma is a tiny spot of parched prairie 100 miles north west of Oklahoma City. It is over twenty miles from the next nearest town that gets a name on google maps. Oakwood is tiny. The 2000 census listed 70 inhabitants (more people work on my floor in my office building) and a google camera shot of the
Several nations have reprinted their earlier stamps for collectors. The United States did so in 1876, reprinting scores of out of print issues for the 1876 Centennial Exposition so that the Post Office could have for sale examples of all of the postage stamps that had ever been issued. Most were sold in quantities of less than 500
Stamp collectors can always be a bit sanguine when the rest of the world gets upset if the Producer Price Index goes up a bit. German inflation during the early Weimar period defies belief until you actually see it. The scan here is of the front and back of a 1923 cover with over 30 billion marks
Billions of Marks Read More »
There was a time in our hobby where you couldn’t really call yourself a collector unless you belonged to a stamp club. Thousands of clubs existed in this country and, in Philadelphia alone, in 1970, a collector could go to a different stamp club meeting five days a week. There were over twenty clubs in the