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Philately differs country to country in the degree of specialization with which it is pursued. For many Latin American countries a specialist will want only the classic stamp, perhaps a few multiples, and a cover or two. Mexico has the district overprints which offer a delight of minutiae but among Latin American philately this is […]

Collectors usually want three things in a philatelic specialty-aesthetic appeal, acquisition challenge and affordability. Each collector defines these terms differently. But we all want the stamps that we collect to be intrinsically attractive. We want our ability to obtain them to equal our interest in the philatelic hunt and we want the cost of the

Certainly the stamps of India have increased in popularity in the last ten years. India is one of the more interesting countries to collect as it can be collected at any price point and with wide degrees of specialization. Most Indian stamps are inexpensive, often selling for less that a dollar a set. Even scarcer

Russian stamps of the 1930’s have always fascinated me. They are beautiful and well designed with friendly, internationalist themes and yet they were issued by a vicious regime that was systematically exploiting its citizens and was highly militaristic in orientation. Another aggressive state of this period, Germany, at least was more honest about its goals

“Mauritius” is a play by Theresa Rebeck that played on Broadway in 2007. In the play, a young woman inherits a stamp collection that contains the two Post Office Mauritius stamps which together have a catalog value of nearly $2 million. She appears to have no idea what she has and takes the stamps to

In 1954 Roger Bannister accomplished a feat that many sports observers had never thought was possible. He ran a mile in under 4 minutes. Within six weeks Bannister’s own record was broken. Running faster than a four minute mile became the norm among world class runners though previously the record had held for centuries (the

During the nineteenth century, several nations maintained post offices in China. This was was part of a general carving up of Chinese sovereignty which went on throughout the nineteenth century. To facilitate those post offices stamps were issued. Italy issued stamps for use in China in 1917, France beginning in 1901 (and ending in 1945,

The perpetual question of which stamps should have major catalog number status ‘A’ and ‘B’ and which should be delegated to small “a” and “b”s as varieties occupied a great deal of catalog makers time in the early decades of the last century. The solutions that were adopted were really compromises that reflected the needs