Blog

Throughout the late nineteenth century Germany was as involved as any European power in the fight to carve up China for political and commercial advantage. The United States, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, and France also issued stamps for their sovereign city states on the Chinese mainland. These city states were land ceded by the Chinese […]

Turkey today is a country with only moderate influence in areas that most often make headlines in American newspapers. But until World War I Turkey was often an important player in the European theater. Turkey, through Byzantium, later named Constantinople, was at the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, and though Rome itself was sacked

For over 75 years the United States has issued stamps for Duck Hunting. To go hunting, each year a hunter must purchase a (now $25) Federal Duck hunting stamp and usually a state duck hunting stamp as well. The proceeds from the sale of the stamps are a user tax, going back to wetlands and duck

Wars require the movement of troops and material, and this requires communication, which means mail. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who were sent to fight and die in France at the end of World War I were sent with two postal issues all of their own. Soldiers like booklet stamps as they can be

Now is the time to begin your specialized collection of Olympic stamps. The popularity of this thematic flows in quadrennial cycles, usually peaking a few months before the games themselves. Olympic philately is one of the most interesting and long established of the topical philatelic areas with the first set being issued by Greece for the first

Every country has sub specialties that are avidly collected by internal collectors, but which foreign specialist collectors of those countries never really warm too. As an auctioneer you can see this in bidding patterns and where certain stamps eventually sell to. Ordinary Great Britain stamps in our auctions sell to Americans, Canadians, Britons and Europeans.

For stamp dealers coming of age in the 1960s the stamp world was replete with Europeans who had escaped from Hitler and Stalin. Most were Jews, though looking back through the less opaque lens of our time, I know several were political escapees and at least one was fortunate enough to get out or he would have

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 war than

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