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We have listed today our end of the year direct sale. In it are over 5000 lots available for your collection at the click of your mouse. There are lots of United States stamps, British Commonwealth including Canada and extensive General Foreign including collections and accumulations. Nearly $2 million dollars of sales value is included here […]

The Lone Wolf was a detective series in the 1920’s about a high end burglar named Michael Lanyard who helped the police solve crimes. The series was written by Louis Joseph Vance and was made into about twenty movies in the 1930’s. I happened to see one recently on TCM entitled The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date.

Linn’s is reporting this week that a collector in Sweden bought a cheap world wide collection at an auction and there was a rare syllabic character (plate number) on a 6 sen 1875 Cherry Blossom issue-rare to the tune of being worth perhaps $200,000 on a stamp that is otherwise only a few dollars. This

The Endowment Effect is a concept in behavioral economics which states that people tend to increase their idea of the value of an item depending on whether or not they are the owner. The Endowment Effect was first hypothesized by the economist Richard Thaler and is an example of a big name for an idea that

Stamps were collected from 1840 onwards and within a few decades specialized collectors were trying to get their favorite stamps used on cover as well as off cover. But the earliest collectors collected both their stamps and covers only by country and it was not until about 1920 that the first thematic cover collectors came into being.

Hard as this is to believe, throughout the 1950’s the United States Post Office issued an average of ten stamps per year with a total face value of 30c. Last year there were over 150 issues with a $77 face value. When one is tallying up where collector dollars get spent it is hard to avoid wondering

A few years ago I read an article about how smaller town diamond merchants send their stock to each other by ordinary First Class mail. The article said that outside New York the incidence of First Class mail going astray is nearly nonexistent. Apfelbaum’s send out thousands of packages per year, mostly through the postal

Its hard to believe that the post office’s troubles are as bad as some are saying when a simple two part solution can fix so many money issues. The Post Office announced that it is closing half of the main sorting facilities that it operates and that this will save the Post Office $6.5 billion

Stamp theft, despite the scare stories that you sometimes hear, is really not much of a problem. We rarely have a customer inform us that his stamps were stolen and the APS’s stamp theft committee almost never sends out an advisory of a stolen collection. In the 1970’s stamp theft was more of an issue