People began writing about stamps almost as soon as they began collecting them. The first stamp magazines, really little more than dealer price lists with articles, were issued before 1840 and by the 1890s the London Philatelist, the precursor journal of the Royal Society of London, was actively publishing monthly scholarly philatelic articles. By 1900, […]
Philatelic Literature Read More »
Among the most interesting stamps that exist in our hobby are the stamps of the German States. What we call Germany today is a very recent political invention. The area of Germany was never part of the Roman Empire, and so the various Germanic tribes that occupied and conquered that area were never unified. As
Foreign collectors believe that collecting United States stamps is the most difficult of all national collecting specialties. The reason is that we make too many major catalog numbers of stamps on which the differences are very hard to distinguish. It starts with the one cent 1851’s of which there are seven major catalog numbers of a single design
Difficulty of Collecting US Banknotes Read More »
The engine of philatelic popularity and growth over the 170 or so years that philately has been a hobby has traditionally been the stamps of Central Europe-Germany and its numerous component areas, Switzerland, Austria and to a lesser extent Liechtenstein. In 1930 there were probably as many serious German collectors as there were in the rest of
The Future of Central European Philately Read More »
The three great scourges of humanity have historically been war, famine, and pestilence. Modern technology though seems to have solved the problems of the devastation of two of these. In the last two centuries over 100 million people have died in famines. But fertilization, irrigation and genetic engineering have today made famine more of a byproduct of
Before 1859 Romania didn’t exist in its current form and one of its component nations, Moldavia, was one of the first issuers of stamps. The famous Moldavia Bulls have been a favorite of philatelists since the beginning of our hobby. They combine the three characteristics that collectors most esteem-they were issued for purely postal purposes
There are three things that every collector should do to maximize the return that they receive for their stamps when they go to sell, and I will address them in ascending order of importance. First, it is very important to have some figures on your stamp collection. Do you have records of how much you spent?
How to Sell Your Stamps Read More »
The degree of difficulty of a philatelic specialty is determined by three components. First is the intrinsic scarcity of the material, second the cost involved, and third the number of specialized striations into which the field has been separated. Scarcity and cost are related. Scarcity is an intrinsic value related to the amount of material that
Coin collecting has been dominated over the last fifty years by third party grading issues to the point where few serious numismatists buy non-graded coins. Eager grading services have tried to push into philately hoping to enlarge their fee base. So far it hasn’t worked. Some collectors have become enamored of graded stamps but most
Graded United States Stamps Read More »