The growth of Asian philately has undermined traditional thinking about where new collectors come from. The traditional model has been the evolutionary model- children (usually boys) introduced to the hobby and collecting in their youth become re enamored with stamps in middle to old age. This paradigm has described the traditional collecting arc in the […]
The relative popularity of mint and used United States stamps has been constantly changing during the history of our hobby. The first generation of collectors had little relish for mint stamps. Philately was hardly more than a diversion then and few collectors had the seriousness of purpose to seek quality let alone mint. These collectors
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The United States Post Office announced last month that they were planning to close 3700 post offices nationwide. For many years the post office has floated large lists of post office closings only to back off at the last moment and close considerably fewer than were on the original list. Still, given the decline in
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The Society of Friends are a small religious group many of whom settled in the Philadelphia area in the 1680’s and today run many of the better secondary schools here. Better known as Quakers, they believe that “there is that of God in every man”, in nonviolence, and in the inherent good in every person.
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One of the most interesting countries to collect is the Dominican Republic. The first issues are crudely printed from domestically produced plates and the major varieties of the first thirty or so stamps are not design types but paper varieties. Philatelist have traditionally treated major paper types as grounds for a major catalog number. The
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Cognitive dissonance is a concept in psychology which states among other things, that the disconnect between what we do and what we believe creates discomfort and to deal with that internal discomfort we alter our perceptions of what we do to be more in line with what we want to believe about ourselves (that is,
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Apfelbaum buys over 500 collections a year from collectors-that’s 500 intact collections as they are made by their owners over a period of (usually) decades of collecting. So we get to see first hand what people actually have and what they actually collect, not what they say they have and what they wished they had
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Martin Chuzzlewit is one of Charles Dickens’ earlier novels. Old Martin is a very unappealing character, avaricious and sneaky, and in speaking of him Dickens remarks that in some people there is a naivety or duplicity of cunning, by which he meant that often cunning people believe that they are the only ones who operate that
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Recently we bought a collection from a life long collector that wasn’t the greatest we ever have handled in terms of value, though it was worth quite a bit. It wasn’t the most scholarly collection we have ever bought, though the collector was a very good philatelist. And it wasn’t the most aesthetically appealing collection