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The stamp dealers of the older generation had a fair number of odd characters, but none were more odd than Morton Paul Goldfarb. Mort, as everyone called him, went to every auction, every stamp show and no matter where you went, you were sure to see him too. Mort specialized in the stamps of the […]

Traditional philatelic understanding is that there are three things that are required for a country to be a popular stamp collecting country – large population, high educational levels, and wealth. If you have those three things, which countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan and China have, you have a strong stamp collecting market.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s the stamp business underwent a shift. The traditional stamp store began not to work very well as a philatelic sales model. At the time dealers thought this was because it didn’t make sense to have a store front for which the vast majority of people who passed by had no

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a philatelic organization called the Society of Philaticians. This society was the brain child of a wonderful older man named Gustav Detjen who lived in the HudsonValley and who for his day job had been in the real estate business. Detjen felt that there were organizations for stamp collectors,

One of the finest people I ever met was a stamp dealer named Stuart Printz. Stu ran a mail order stamp business from Allentown, Pa, and for many years would come to our auctions to buy stock for his sales catalogs. Stu died in 1992, 24 years ago. And yet, he was such a kind

The H.E. Harris company is one of the oldest stamp companies in the United States. Henry Harris started from packet selling and stamp approvals. By 1930, Harris realized that the biggest impediment to selling stamps was that his customers had no place to put them.   In 1930 Harris produced a philatelic radio show starring

What Can Be Done: Victoria is a very specialized country. The first 60 catalog numbers comprise only two stamp design types – the differences in the stamps coming down to denomination, color, paper, perforation and watermark. This is what traditional philately, in the era before pervasive new issues, was like. Remember, in the 1920’s, when

I’m not much of a TV watcher. When I’m in a bit of a masochistic mood, I’ll turn on the Phillies game or the Eagles and watch them lose. But most evenings, after dinner and an hour or two with my wife, I go to my reading room and read novels and history and politics

There has been enough stamp writing books and journals to fill a large library. The American Philatelic Research Library in Bellefonte, Pa has thousands of published volumes, and tens of thousands of journals and monographs. But, though one can find books on the Aerograms of Australia or on the forgeries of Saxony, one of the