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The nineteenth century was a wonderful time for progress. Rapid scientific advances and technological innovations created a mindset that change was possible, even preferable, and that change could be a positive force. The current attitude is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In the nineteenth century, people looked for better ways to do things. […]

A collector challenged me recently in an email. Find the first stamp object on your desk, and write an article on it, the only rule being that the item have no obvious philatelic value. As soon as I finished the email, my eyes alighted on the item found above. The Dutch stamp on this cover

At the turn of the twentieth Century, the Post Office of the United States was under constant criticism from philatelists because of our stamp issuing policy. The Post Office had decided to commemorate the 1893 Columbian Exposition with a long commemorative set, and the set they produced (Scott #230-245) had a face value of over $16

Like most issues that really don’t matter in our hobby, there is somewhat of a dispute over when and where the first philatelic exhibition took place. The first stamp shows that called themselves “philatelic exhibitions” began about 1920 in Europe. But there is considerable logic for allowing that the Centennial Exhibition of the United States (which

Figure 1 Figure 2 Until about 1930, stamp designs were very conventional. Playing off a stamp’s role as a form of money, the first designs were largely coin type centers framed in a vignette. The pictures in the centers were largely people of some importance (either real or mythical) to the country [examples are in

The United States Columbian Exposition set is a set of fifteen values that was issued in 1893 to commemorate the exposition of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the new world (the Exposition was a sort of early version of a World’s Fair). The stamps were the world’s first commemorative set and one of the

The stamps of Soviet Russia have special fascinations. In the period after WWII, Russia was still under the rule of Josef Stalin. There is quite a historical debate over who was history’s greatest monster. Stalin may not rank number one in murders, but when it came to vindictiveness and pathological paranoid homicides, he would have

Cover collecting is the generic term for collecting stamps on envelopes. It includes two broad categories: Postal historical covers, that is, stamps on envelopes collected to show the stamps as they were used for postal purposes, and Philatelic covers, that is, covers made for collectors, usually to commemorate some special event. Philatelic covers come in