Imagine a company, which like the Scott publishing company, (so dominant in United States philately) is preeminent as its national stamp publisher. As well as issuing a general worldwide catalog, they are especially known as the publisher of the national specialty catalog which is used by nearly all native philatelists and millions of foreign ones. But in addition to this, they also […]
Stamp Investment and Stanley Gibbons Read More »
Cover collecting did not begin at the same time as did stamp collecting. Philately had its start in earnest about 1860, and, really, until about 1910, cover collecting was something collectors did when they didn’t have the time to wash the stamps they needed for their collections off the envelopes on which they had bought
Several years ago, President Obama made a gaffe and was widely criticized for his statement regarding the appearance the Attorney-General of California, Kamala Harris. Most philatelists are middle aged men (in fact over 90% of serious collectors are male) and most of us no doubt don’t see what the fuss is all about. The President
Why Don’t More Women Collect Stamps Read More »
When I was an annoying teenager helping out at the Apfelbaum stamp store in the 1960s, every Saturday brought in the fascinating Ken Whittle. Ken was the kind of philatelist that you saw a lot of then. Ken was the archetype of the “solitudinous collector” (or SC). SCs are people for whom philately is very
In 1948 Germany was in ruins. Destruction caused by the war was nearly total and even three years after the war many Germans were hungry. The United States government put forward the Marshal Plan and the United States pumped the current day equivalent of $500 billion into Europe to rebuild that continent. Republicans and Democrats
What Can Be Done: Aden is an excellent country to collect for many reasons. First, Aden’s stamp issues are few. The first stamps were not issued until 1937 and the last issues were in 1965. Scott lists only 75 stamps and even including the issues of the Aden States of Kathiri and Quaiti there are
Some of the most popular US philatelic issues of the twentieth century are the Farley issues. They are Scott #753-771, and though avidly collected today, like many popular stamps, they had a checkered past. James A. Farley was a New York party politician who was instrumental in Franklin Roosevelt’s rise to the Democratic Party nomination
There is no country that is collected in a more specialized way than are the stamps of Austria. Most specialists of other countries seek cancels and covers and blocks and all kinds of specialty items. But Austrian specialists go way further. Austrian specialty catalogs list paper varieties along with varieties listed by thickness as measured by a micrometer.
Ulrich Ferchenbauer Read More »
About forty years ago (as one of the first stamp tasks I was involved in professionally), we consulted with the Philadelphia Library over their philatelic collection. Philadelphia had been the recipient of the Hiram Deats library which was donated to them in 1952. It still laid in cartons in the enormous main library basement when