In the 1960’s and 1970’s a fixture at stamp auctions in the United States was Claude Jaeger. Claude ran a small stamp business that dealt in Western Europe mint sets, and he was always at our auctions to bid on these stamps. Claude’s history was an interesting one. Claude was Haitian and had been born […]
We like to think of philately as a sophisticated and intellectual hobby. Little known, however, is the boost that stamp collecting got gratifying the interests and fantasies of adolescent boys. We live, today, in a world of pervasive nudity, but in the period of greatest philatelic interest (the 1930’s) there wasn’t even Playboy magazine.
What Can Be Done: Tasmania is one of the most interesting of the Australian States. The early engraved stamps are amongst the finest in all of philately. The first two issues of Tasmania are very different from most of the British Commonwealth issues, all of which share a common design feel. The later nineteenth century
Scott is the name that is synonymous with stamp collecting in the United States. J. Walter Scott was one of America’s first stamp dealers. When he started his stamp business around 1870, he was a full service dealer selling stamps via extensive price lists. The lists became more detailed and he began to list stamps
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In the 1950’s, the Dennis the Menace comic strip was a weekly feature in virtually every newspaper in America. The trop of the comic was a well meaning but mischievous boy, Dennis, who was always getting in some sort of trouble either unintentionally or because of some complicated set of circumstances that he created. His usual
Kasimir Bileski, or as he was known professionally K. Bileski, was already a philatelic mainstay when I came into the stamp business in the 1960’s. Born of Ukrainian immigrant parents in 1908, Bileski’s philatelic career is in many ways instructive of how philately changed during the Twentieth Century. His biography is fascinating. He was truly a
Most fans of philatelic history— that is, the history of collecting stamps rather than the stamps themselves— have learned what they know through hands-on work with stamps. There are very few books that retell the evolution of our hobby. Largely, it is learned by reading old journals, looking at old auction catalogs, and stamp dealer
The last comprehensive catalog of Revenue Stamps of the World was issued by the French dealer Forbin in the year 1915. After that date, the collecting of worldwide revenue stamps began to fall off in popularity. In a very few countries, the United States and France come to mind, the collecting of native revenue stamps
In stamp collecting, there are four “… and States” areas that are collected as cohesive collecting specialties and that have always had tremendous philatelic cachet. They are German States, Italian States, Indian States, and Australian States. Each area is enormously popular and avidly collected as part of classic philately. Each has its own collecting peculiarities,
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