The philately of Spain is one of the most interesting. The nineteenth century issues number over 200 face different varieties, much more than most other countries (the United States has more collectible varieties, but we include as major collectible catalog numbers the types of the 1851-57 issue, the subtle shades of the 5c 1857 , the […]
May 6, 1840 was the first day of the first stamp. Many inventions are derivative. The automobile, for instance, didn’t appear in fully developed form. Many engineers and inventors from many countries worked on various car platforms, improving the work of previous designs, to get the point of a fully functioning modern car. This type of
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Our hobby is over 160 years old, and for most of that time philatelists have been complaining about three things that have made their hobby problematic: access to material that they need, prices, and fear of adding altered or counterfeit material to their collections. In philately today, the good news is that these long time
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Philately is probably the most international hobby of them all. Few coin collectors collect coins of any but their home country. Other major collecting hobbies all have a nationalistic skew, if only because collectors tend to try to create in adulthood collections that they couldn’t afford as children. There were no Lionel or H&O trains
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One of the great changes in the stamp world has been the extinction of a species of philatelic professional called the Satchelateer. This type of dealer was common in the early part of the twentieth century and began to decline in numbers around 1980. Satchelateers (and the word is formed from “satchel” which is a large
On Sunday April 28, 2013, the cover photograph of the New York Times Sunday Book Review was the sheet of the 8
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Certificates of genuiness grew out of dealer guarantees. Until about 1900, the pool of stamps that there was to collect was so small that the more reputable dealers knew them cold. True too was the fact that the great forgers of the twentieth century (Fournier, Sperati, and De Thuin) had not yet begun their work.
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Rowland Hill’s idea for pre-printed postage stamps, that acted as a sort of bearer certificate for a service purchased but not yet obtained, was not formed in a vacuum. Printed postage stamps were a new idea, but embossed revenue stamps (and even a few embossed postage stamps from the Italian area) had been around for
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