What Can Be Done: Luxembourg is a relatively unpopular philatelic country. Writers have ascribed this to Luxembourg’s small internal market (population only a bit over 500,000). Iceland however is far smaller, as is St Pierre and Miquelon, yet their stamps are far more popularly collected than the stamps of Luxembourg. No, it’s not population or […]
What Can Be Done: Greenland is a very popular country. It combines well designed stamps with a responsible issuing policy. Before WWII, Greenland was a territory of Denmark, so Greenland has only issued stamps for seventy years. There are no pesky nineteenth century stamps that are priced out of reach. Only the first set is
US First day Covers began in earnest about 1909 and, more than anything, were the brain child of a young Philadelphia collector named Philip Ward. Ward went on to become a major US collector and dealer (in those days of the turn of the last Century, poor liquidity in the stamp market forced many prominent collectors
What Can Be Done: Western Australia is one of the more interesting of the Australian States (and indeed of the entire British Commonwealth) to collect. The reason is that the designs are completely different from any other British colonial issues, the stamps incorporating the Swan of Western Australia. Most countries, following the lead of Great
Western Australia Stamps Read More »
Innovations are largely incremental. When phones first became portable, they were simply portable phones. It took Steve Jobs (and better technology) to add cameras and computers to phones, so that most of us could walk around with more computing power in our pockets than existed worldwide thirty years ago. The fact that they are also phones
What Can Be Done: San Marino is one of philately’s glamour boys. It is a tiny country, the 3rd smallest in Europe, and has a very small population. But San Marino has issued over a thousand stamps going back to the 1880’s. Its popularity has to do with its remoteness. Collectors, especially those of the
Elliot Perry may well have been the preeminent philatelist in an era that had some pretty good stamp scholars. Perry began his most famous series of articles in 1931. Entitled “Pat Paragraph”, these scholarly articles continued until the late 1950’s. Collected and republished in 1971 they run to over 650 pages of dense information and
Elliot Pery And How The Philatelic World Has Changed Read More »
We, the aging baby boomers, have seen prices rise considerably over time. Everyone has their stories of 50c movies and 25c hotdogs. Prices and the value of money are difficult to evaluate over time. But readers of Victorian novels know that in the late nineteenth century an income of 150 Pounds a year was enough
High Value 19th Century Stamps Were Very Expensive Read More »
A little more than five years ago Bill Welch died. He was 67. I first met Bill at the 1980 APS convention and we were friends for thirty years. Bill at the time was editor and publisher of the Center County Daily Times, the newspaper in State College, Pa. He was mayor of State College