Let’s suppose most people had too much money and needed so badly to lose some of it that they offered courses in how to lose it. I can’t speak of what they would teach when the course concerned non philatelic areas, but when the subject came to stamp collecting there is no doubt that the […]
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Perhaps the greatest American philatelist was John N Luff. Born in 1860 and a collector from childhood, he was involved in US philately in its very earliest years. Luff became a professional philatelist in his twenties and was the President of the Scott Stamp and Coin Company and an editor of the Scott catalog. He
In the nineteenth century Malaysia was like India, an amalgam of independent states nominally aligned under a central government. One of the most interesting of these states was Sarawak. This was a country carved out of Borneo for Sir James Brooke, a British adventurer who helped the Sultan of Brunei against an insurrection. This was
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
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In 2012, F.Burton Sellers was one of the winners of the American Philatelic Society’s Hall of Fame award for that year. Unlike baseball’s Hall of Fame which is for the living and dead alike, the APS’s Hall of Fame is only for deceased philatelists who have had a measurable impact on our hobby. Bud (as
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Life us a series of developmental stages and how we progress through them has a great deal to do with how happy we are with our lives. Philately too has developmental stages and how collectors progress through them is important in increasing the joy that we derive from our hobby. The earliest stage in stamp
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There are few philatelists of the last few decades that have had more impact on our hobby than Varro Tyler. Tyler, who died in 2001, was tireless researcher and philatelic writer. Accomplished in both his professional field (botanical pharmacology, where he was a professor for many years at Perdue) and in the philately, Tyler’s main
Film and philately share a golden era with personalities larger than life, from a time that is quite different than our own. Jacques Minkus was such a personality. Minkus’s method of selling stamps was to open concessions in major department stores and at its most extensive he had over 35 different shops in many of the largest
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Offices Abroad stamps are stamps that are issued for use in a foreign post office under a treaty with a foreign government. It allows the first country the right to maintain one of its own post offices on the territory of the second. Offices Abroad are usually the result of powerful commercial interests in the
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