Blog

The 1930 edition of the Scott catalog listed all the stamps of the world in one 1,700 page, 4×6, two column volume (today is six large volumes). Prices were interesting. The mint ten cent type IV of the 1857 US issue (Scott #34 mint) cataloged just $300. Today we know that there are fewer than […]

In baseball, small ball refers to the concept of scoring runs without big hits. All hitters are streaky, going hot and cold and though everybody loves to see home runs, what separates great teams from good teams is the ability to score runs with few or even no hits. In the 1960’s there was something

Regular readers of this column know that one of my pet philatelic peeves is that the Scott catalog listings of United States stamps is unnecessarily complex, and that that complexity makes our hobby less popular than it could be. To have made the types of the one cent 1851 separate major catalog numbers is silly.

Advertising is so pervasive in American society that it’s hard to realize that we are one of the few first world countries that never used them in philatelic issues for private advertisements. Advertising on stamps was first used by New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. Their “back prints” were government sold advertising printed on

We are offering a collection described as follows:   COLONIAL PHILATELY Most really comprehensive, worldwide collections are very strong in traditional philatelic areas, and this wonderful collection of many tens of thousands of stamps, housed in 11 clean and neat Master Global albums, is no exception. Germany, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Latin America are all

Italian history is relatively little known in the U.S. Most of us have heard of Napoleon and Bismarck, Lenin and D’Israeli, but few know of Italy’s Victor Emmanuel II or Umberto and the fight to unify Italy.   As the western Roman Empire crumbled in the late fifth century, Italy became a series of principalities,

One of the most idiosyncratic aspects of US philately is the collecting of plate blocks. Many countries have marginal plate numbers in the selvedges of the sheets of their printed stamps. Most United States stamps that were printed before 1894 had plate numbers in the selvedge, put there by the private printing contractor who printed

After confederation with Canada in the late nineteenth century, Newfoundland continued to issue its own postage stamps. The classics of Newfoundland are very scarce, but the stamps issued after 1900 are among the most popular in the hobby. Newfoundland used the American Bank Note Company to print its stamps, and it seems that a bit

Stamps played a big part in the communications revolution of the nineteenth century. Before the innovation of postage stamps, mail service was expensive and little used. In the United States in 1840, the per capita number of letters carried by the postal service was three. By 1900 the average person received nearly seventy letters. Before