Blog

We posted today our annual end of the year sale with over a million dollars of inventory, all at 60% of its original price. Go to our web site and click and you will find value like never before. And Apfelbaum full satisfaction guarentee applies.

Last year Philly Stamp Company moved out of Philly to a new home in suburban New Jersey. We moved out of Philadelphia seven years ago and center city now has only one stamp dealer- Alfred Capelli- whose signage boasts trains and hobbies as well as stamps. In the 1950’s Philly had over 20 stamp shops.

“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

Plate numbers were put in the margins of United States sheets so that later the printer would know which sheets were printed from which plates so that plate wear and damage could be monitored. Collectors noticed the marginal numbers and began at first collecting single stamps with the selvedge attached as an adjunct to their

Lost in all the discussion about how the recession is affecting philatelic demand is a discussion of the role that bank loans and credit have played in the softness in the philatelic market. The vast majority of philatelic material on the market at any given time is in the hands of stamp dealers. Most dealers

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 question of which stamps should have major catalog number status 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 of the commercial community.

A favorite philatelic country is St Pierre and Miquelon. There is a philatelic tendency for remote areas of great charm to have a collecting importance far in excess of what any local population can create. The Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Pitcairns are examples, as is St Pierre. The Islands have a local population