Open your newspaper or look online, and hardly a day goes by in which some new CNN or Bloomberg poll isn’t measuring some aspect of American life. How much time do we spend watching TV? Or exercising? Or intending to exercise as we watch TV? Nearly every aspect of our lives is polled and measured and […]
Polling Philatelists Read More »
Most American stamp dealers try to do pretty much the same thing to stock their business. They buy collection lots, usually at auction or from wholesale price lists. The way this works, when it is done properly, is to buy a collection and then break it into a number of smaller units that appeal more
A Different Way of Selling stamps Read More »
Many philatelic writers have commented on the poor rate of success of stamp dealers. Look at a Linn’s Stamp News from 1960. With the exception of one or two companies (including Earl P. L. Apfelbaum, Inc.), there are very few professional stamp firms still active that were in business then. Certainly the world changes and businesses
Stamp Businesses Seldom last More than One Generation Read More »
It is a curious fact, mostly to do with poorly designed and implemented rules, that banking crises in tiny countries can bring the world financial system nearly to collapse. Places like Iceland and Cyprus, which were more well known to philatelists than to the general public, have been given the power (by the European Union’s bizarrely lax banking rules) to
Recently we got a call from a Thrift Shop in the Hatboro area, a small town just a few miles from our office. The shop had been given a collection that they felt was pretty valuable, and they wanted us to look at it. They were very upfront about the terms of sale which were as
While Francois Fournier was a philatelic facsimile maker whose work fools only novices or collectors who have never seen the real thing, Jean de Sperati spent his life creating forgeries designed to undermine the most knowledgeable philatelists. Even his book that he wrote Philatelie sans Experts (Philately without Experts) shows his prime motivation was the
Philately lacks drama. Maybe that’s why stamp collectors love a good scandal in our hobby. Though philatelists tend to differ in opinion on what constitutes a good stamp scandal, most will agree that a good scandal must be international in scope, affect thousands of collectors, and defraud collectors of large amounts of money. By these standards
The goal of the Postal Service has always been speed. The history of mail delivery, from the Roman postal roads to overnight service, has been one of ever increasing rapidity of written communication. Time is money, and the value of the post, especially in the post-1840 philatelic period, has been the ever increasing availability of