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Quality standards in our hobby have remained static for so long that there are few collectors active today who are aware that the standards that seem so normal today have really evolved over the last century of collecting. The earliest collectors had no quality standards to speak of. Any copy of a stamp, no matter […]

Frederick Maynard Sundman (or “Maynard” as all knew him) was one of the most successful and innovative stamp dealers of the twentieth century. Born in 1915, Sundman was a stamp dealer from the age of twenty, beginning a small mail order company which he operated out of his home. Sundman joined the army at the

No American philatelist has had more influence on our hobby than John Walter Scott. Scott became involved with stamps at a very early period and by the late 1860s was publishing a price list that he later expanded into a worldwide stamp catalog.  Scott was originally a seller of stamps, and it was only in

There were two great waves of philatelic giants—the founders and the consolidators. The founders were the Big Five present at the creation of our hobby. Philatelists such as J. Walter Scott, Stanley Gibbons, Moens in Belgium, John Luff, and Heinrich Kohler—these five philatelists created, shortly after 1850, the catalogs and the albums that essentially defined

Henry Ellis Harris was born in 1902 and became a stamp dealer at the age of 14. Stamp collecting was a very popular hobby in the early twentieth century, and Harris combined his love for the hobby with modern merchandising techniques to greatly popularize the hobby of stamp collecting.  In the process of creating a

Deciding what to do with a loved one’s stamp collection is a daunting task for most people. The person who made the collection knows best what they have, what they have spent, and has some idea how to best go about disposing of the stamp collection that they made. Family members and heirs often are

The question of what is the most interesting area of philately to specialize in was a hot topic among philatelic writers before 1950. Collectors then had, for the most part, a broader based knowledge of their hobby than do collectors today. This was for two main reasons. First, there were far fewer stamps that had

As the number of distinct collectible stamp varieties passes a million and moves quickly toward two, the importance of catalog values has changed. There is nowhere near enough collectors with enough interest, time, and money to absorb all the newer stamps that come to market, let alone the enormous quantities of older material that is

Most of the pre-1940 listings for most counties in the Scott catalog contain many varieties. The “a” and “b” numbers are legion, listing subtleties of shade and perforation. After 1940, variety listings are seldom found. Most collectors think this is because advances in printing technology made for fewer varieties of more modern stamps. But this