Most special stamps relate to postal use and postal purposes. Stamps such as Airmails are higher denominated stamps and the extra revenue is used to defray the cost of the class of service that is being used. But War Tax stamps are a different animal entirely-they are a country using its postal service to generate revenue for another […]
Economic theory extols the virtue of trade and many anthropologists credit trade with being among the human inventions that most advanced civilization and material wealth. Stamps facilitated trade as their invention and use made communications easier, and ease of communications is one of the conditions that improves trade. Throughout the Nineteenth Century it was agricultural products
Among the most interesting specializations in our hobby are the stamps of Canada and especially the issue of 1880-1890 that are called the “Large Queens”. The name that philatelists have given this set refers to their physical relationship to the set of stamps that came after them. These stamps are large-the next issues was much
British Honduras was the only Colony in Latin America, British, Spanish, Portuguese or French, that wasn’t set up to extract silver or gold or produce the eighteenth and nineteenth century agricultural equivalent, sugar. British Honduras was an extractive colony of a different kind-it was set up to harvest timber. Some of the finest trees in
Suppose you were a fellow collector of my grandfather Earl Apfelbaum in the 1920s. The probability is that you would be a world wide collector with perhaps a single country concentration. You would have a hardbound Scott album or a McKeels album as Minkus and Harris were still years in the future. You mounted your
Stamp Collecting in the 1920s Read More »
Philately is a far more democratic hobby than most. In America today, the top 1% of people own about 40% of societal assets. Such a pyramided wealth schema is probably true of many of the more serious collector hobbies as well. Outside of museums, the top 1% probably owns nearly all the Old Master paintings
Forty years ago the stamp selling world was divided into four main methods of sale. There were retail stamp shops, stamp auctions, dealer price lists and stamp shows. Apfelbaum attended over thirty shows a year as bourse dealers and I did most of them. The show life was a hard life. Packing up your stock
Chile is the wealthiest country in Latin America. The country lies along a narrow strip of land along the west coast of the South American continent bordered by the Andes mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Chile’s climate ranges from some of the driest hottest deserts to frozen Antarctic landscapes. It’s wealth
The Arab spring which started out so peacefully with the change of the governments of Egypt and Tunisia took a turn for the more violent this summer when NATO was involved in the overthrow of the Libyan government. Libyan stamps have now begun their fourth phase. First, there were the issues of the Italian Colony