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The United States Post Office has commemorated everything from baseball to rock stars, from Faulkner to Disney. We do really well at honoring our heroes and often at overvaluing the trivial. But as a nation we aren’t very comfortable with commemorating or honoring our painful experiences. Our philatelic commemoration of the most painful American experience, the Civil […]

When I began this blog a couple a years ago the purpose was to tell a few stories about our hobby, to talk about the way the hobby used to be and identify some of the the changes that have occurred in Philately. Little did I think that within two short years there would be

Especially scary about the death of North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Il is the effect it will have on South Korea. When the Koreas were partitioned in the early post WW II period, they were both equally devastated. But while North Korea has gone from poor to destitute, South Korea has been the poster child for capitalism, ending

Kim Jong-Il has died. As leader of North Korea, he presided over his nation’s continued slide into abject poverty and oppression. There are few laboratory tests in any environment that so clearly measure the differences in political systems as did North and South Korea. Divided after complete devastation during WW II, the North took a Maoist and Stalinist central

For many years in the property market is has been said that there are three things that influence prices and will insure investors a good return-location, location, location. Similarly, the unstated emphasis in stamp investment has been quality with the suggestion that only the finest examples of each stamp will be a good investment. This

Gum has had a long relationship with printing on postage stamps. In the pre 1930s days, flat press printing meant that sheets of paper were fed into the press one by one and then the printed sheets were hung up to dry, gummed and weighted at the corners so that as the gum contracted the

The first American Philatelic Society certificate was issued a bit over a hundred years ago and it was for a US Occupation of Cuba issue. Following the standards of the time the certificate simply said that the stamp was genuine. The first certificates took their role as “certificates of genuineness” seriously. They said nothing about

Postally speaking, the United Nations is an invention- an organization not a nation or political entity. The fact that it issues its own postage stamps and maintains its own postal service is a concession to the trappings of sovereignty (real political entities control their own post) and a revenue grab (UN stamps can be sold to