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This is the punch line to a rather sad joke. A waiter is waiting on a group of sour customers. Everything is a problem, nothing is good enough. At the conclusion of the meal the waiter, instead of asking if everything is alright, asks if anything is alright. We live in angry times or at […]

A little more than

Much of the history of stamp collecting is really the history of stamp collecting in the German speaking part of Europe. Deutschophones collect stamps at a far greater rate than any other cultural unit. At one time in Germany nearly everyone had a stamp collection with collectors numbering in the millions. This was from an

Fifty years ago, if you had to draw a picture of the average stamp collector, he (and it was a “he”) was an older white male who had a general world wide collection, maybe a US mint collection and definitely a collection of US Plate Blocks and First Day Covers. Today if you were to

I recently came across an old box of early US stamps that had been assembled in the 1920’s by an attorney. I questioned the family carefully. Had their Grandfather been a stamp collector? Not to their knowledge. Good. Why did he throw 1920s mint commemoratives in this box? The reply was that he sent out

Over the weekend my wife and I went to see an Indie called “Get Low” starring Robert Duvall. It was a good movie if you like character driven films with most of the action happening in inner space. At one point there was a scene where one of the characters is shown working on his

An old cousin contacted me this week. She had been researching the play “Mauritius” which has a stamp component in its plot for her husband’s amateur theatrical group and she came upon my name on the Internet. We had not been in touch in many years. She’s a bit older than I am and had

One of the most popular stamp issuing areas is the Falkland Islands. This popularity must be the result of the charm and the mystery of the place as with an average population over the last 150 years of under two thousand residents, the stamps are not valuable as a result of domestic demand. The stamps

There are three main stamp magazines in the United States. Linns Stamp News is a weekly, and the American Philatelist and the American Stamp Dealer and Collector are monthlies. Linns has been around nearly 100 years. It is published weekly and in the days before EBAY and the Internet, it was an ad rag, often