The concept of envy has been in the press recently in a non philatelic context. Envy is the feeling of pain at that which someone else has and which you wish that you had. Philately is one of the hobbies one would think would be most prone to envy. After all most collectors are after […]
Color and shades are one of the most overdone areas of our hobby. During the earliest years of collecting, before 1900, there were simply not enough new stamp issues for the amount of time that collectors had to devote to our hobby. Collectors then parsed and refined their specialties and one way to do this
Postage Dues are one of what are called special service stamps, that is stamps issued for special postal purposes. Such stamps include Parcel Posts, which are stamps intended to be used on packages, Officials which are stamps used on government mail and all of the array of Newspapers and postal tax stamps that grace the back
Middle Eastern stamps are very appealing for a few reasons. First they are politically fascinating. Nearly all of the Middle East was under Turkish control until after WW I. The breakup created a power vacuum which brought Britain and France into play both with and against local populations in setting up new governments. The philately reflects
Like most collectors, different stamps take me back to different times in my life. In the 1960’s my parents sent me to overnight camp and the stamp they sent me with to post my letters home was the 1963 Food For Peace stamp. Every time I see this stamp in a collection I have memories of
Observers of philatelists have long believed that stamp collectors are a very conservative group politically. We don’t have Gallup polls, but through letters to the editor of philatelic publications and personal conversations most of us believe our group to be well to the right on the political spectrum. True we have our liberal outliers but if
Political Orientation of Stamp Collectors Read More »
A question that Americans are going to have to answer in the next few years is whether we want to keep our post offices open and have them continue their daily trips serving us all with mail. We have reluctantly made this decision with Amtrak. Rail travel is not a money maker but we have decided that the benefits
Amtrak and The Post Office Read More »
The high point of stamp journalism was in the 1930’s. Scores of weekly and monthly philatelic periodicals existed, many of them only a few pages and many of the journals existing for only a few issues. The Great Depression put many people out of work and printing companies had tremendous excess capacity so there were
This article about Pay Pal requiring a buyer to destroy an item he thought was counterfeit rather than returning it occurred in the violin collecting field but has interest for stamp collectors. Counterfeits are a problem in every collector field but raise many interesting issues in philately. First, philately has counterfeits that were created to defraud collectors.