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Specialization in philately is defined as restricting your collecting from the general mass of issues to one specific area or stamp issue. Before WW II, most collectors were generalists. They collected the world. But then, a collector could afford to. There were only tens of thousands of stamp issues that a collector needed to acquire […]

The political history of South Africa is fascinating. Originally settled by the Dutch in the sixteenth century, South African areas long bounced back and forth under control of the Boers (as the native Dutch decedents were called), the British, who added South Africa to their list of imperial ambitions in the eighteenth century, and native

Philatelists of earlier generations grew up with a wealth of publications and literature that makes many of today’s collectors envious. The Internet has meant that one can read about stamps any time for free, but the quality of what is written has diminished significantly with the decline of print publications. Forty years ago, stamp collectors

Philatelic scandals come in three sizes—small, medium, and large. The work of Francois Fournier, prolific forger from Switzerland, ranks as a major philatelic scandal. He made hundreds of thousands of reproductions of many of the most popular and collected stamps in the hobby and defrauded, either directly or indirectly, tens of thousands of collectors out

While Francois Fournier was a philatelic facsimile maker whose work fools only novices or collectors who have never seen the real thing, Jean de Sperati spent his life creating forgeries designed to undermine the most knowledgeable philatelists. Even his book that he wrote Philatelie sans Experts (Philately without Experts) shows his prime motivation was the thrill of

Philately lacks drama. Maybe that’s why stamp collectors love a good scandal in our hobby. Though philatelists tend to differ in opinion on what constitutes a good stamp scandal, most will agree that a good scandal must be international in scope, affect thousands of collectors, and defraud collectors of large amounts of money. By these standards

United States coils have always presented a problem to stamp collectors. The first problem was whether they should be collected at all, at least as major numbers with spaces in all the stamp albums. US coils were some of the first worldwide coils to be issued and were done so at the behest of large

One of the constants in history is the malleability of political boundaries. In America, we have become a bit inured to this fact because our own geography has been so steady, adding only Hawaii and Alaska to our country in the last century. But Europe is used to change, and nowhere in Europe has there been more

Dear John,        I’m now back from Vietnam and can provide some comments about how I acquired this collection of Vietnamese stamps. Essentially, stamp collecting exists in Vietnam, as it does worldwide, but at a low level. There are no retailers of stamps of which I’m aware, or auction houses, and most people