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There are five main stamp album makers, each of whom makes a complete set of worldwide specialty albums. In order of cost and quality, the publishers are Minkus, Scott, Davo, Lindner, and Lighthouse, each album having their own advantages. Minkus is the residual publisher from the great Minkus stamp business. At one time, Minkus had […]

Americans tend to have a limited view of the politics and policies of other nations. The policies of Estonia and the feelings of the Estonian people (and the other Baltic States) to the German invasion of 1941 is a perfect illustration of this. Estonia is inhabited by an ethnically and linguistically different people than their

The Red Cross was created by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1859 Dunant was near the battlefield of Solferino and was horrified by the suffering of the 40,000 troops that had been killed or wounded in that battle. There were no medical facilities whatsoever, and the wounded were left among the

The first stamps of Greenland are some of the most interesting and popular stamps in the hobby. They are parcel post stamps issued for use on packages, and they are the world’s first stamps with Polar Bears pictured on them. They were first issued in 1905, and a complete mint set catalogs about $1,200, but

The “colonial era” is something that few people have much awareness of anymore. But, from 1700-1950, most of the world’s land mass was administered as colonies by four main European countries—Great Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain. At one point or another in the last three hundred years these four countries had geopolitical control of all

The Saarland is an area in western Germany boarding France. It has traditionally been one of the major industrial areas in Europe with a skilled and energetic workforce and ready access to coal, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the main fuel used in manufacturing. When WWI ended (and Germany collapsed more

For many Baby Boomers, their main introduction to stamp collecting came from Boy’s Life magazine. Published since 1910, Boy’s Life is a publication of the Boy Scouts of America and the Cub Scouts of America. The magazine was sent for free to anyone who was a member of a Cub Scout pack or a Boy

That is the name of a wonderful book written in the 1960s by the famed philatelic writer and dealer Herman Herst, Jr. “Pat” Herst, as he was called, was a newspaper man and well educated stamp collector who evolved into a full time dealer the way many dealers found their profession. In the 1930s, employment

Two of the most famous literary creations are Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.  Everyone knows Holmes and nearly everyone Lizzy Bennett (the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice).  These two characters were not only well developed in their own right but have been further developed by scores of authors who have written