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Apfelbaum acquires nearly all of our stamps from collectors. Collectors call us when they think they want to dispose of their stamps, and heirs contact us when they have inherited stamps. We have bought tens of thousands of collections from collectors and have a happy record of satisfying sellers. The following are six letters that […]

The Great Recession continues to have serious impact on the nation’s employment picture, its housing market and, sorry to report, the market for US discount postage. For the last sixty years stamp collectors have bought and put away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of US postage stamps. This amount is far in excess of

When I was an annoying teenager helping out at the Apfelbaum stamp store in the 1960s, every Saturday brought in the fascinating Ken Whittle. Ken was the kind of philatelist that you saw a lot of then. Ken was the archetype of the “solitudinous collector” (or SC). SCs  are people for who philately is very important and

In all fields there are mantras that people repeat over and over as what would propel them and their organization to the top. In business, the holy grail is exporting to China (you know 1.5 billion people all of whom will soon need your widget), in higher education it is the prospect of eas(ier) college

Today there is only one national philatelic society

Philatelists in earlier generations grew up with a wealth of publications and literature that makes many of today’s collectors envious. The Internet has meant that one can read about stamps any time for free, but the quality of what is written has diminished significantly with the decline of print publications. Forty years ago, stamp collectors

My elliptical broke last week. I called the service company, and the next day a service person came out who took apart the machine and told me that the parts were largely worn and needed to be replaced and that he thought that the machine wouldn’t be worth repairing. A couple of painless phone calls

US First day Covers began in earnest about 1909 and, more than anything, were the brain child of a young Philadelphia collector named Philip Ward. Ward went on to become a major US collector and dealer (in those days of the turn of the last Century, poor liquidity in the stamp market forced many prominent collectors

One constant issue that lifelong philatelists have with their collections and an issue about which their families have much to say is about the amount of space that a stamp collection takes up. For many collectors, a lifetime in philately means they have assembled their early worldwide collection (which often runs to many volumes), several