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One of my first professional philatelic tasks, some forty years ago, was to assemble old correspondences for sale. You saw these more in those days than you do today, but what they were were large selections of letters that had been sent between correspondents over a period of years. Usually these were things like weekly […]

One of the great stories in cryptology over the last 200 years was working out the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. This was the Egyptian writing of the old dynasties (the ones that had built the pyramids). The writing had fallen out of use and been replaced by different alphabets so that by the beginning of the common

Many collectors who thoroughly enjoy their hobby imagine that their pleasure in their hobby would increase if only they had more stamps. The fantasy grows from one album to a dozen to a full shelf to a stamp room. Recently, we were called in on a case of philatelic gluttony gone wild. The collector was

There are three broad traits that philatelists share with each other. The first is inquisitiveness. Many very intelligent people are quite content with what they know. They do well in their professions and in their life, and their idle time is spent being entertained. Others, people who are receptive to our hobby, love to learn and

Make a prediction for long enough, and it is apt to come true. Brazil is a vast country with a large population and prodigious natural resources. In recent years, huge oil deposits have been found in deep water off shore. And Brazil has always had vast hydroelectric potential. The preconditions for economic success have always

There are very few economic activities that Americans engage in that are not either encouraged or discouraged by the tax code. The tax code currently runs to over 70,000 pages and is involved minutely in most of the activities of our lives. We wake up in the morning and dress in clothes made of taxed textiles,

Get a group of sixty year old doctors together, and you are sure to hear complaints about managed care and capitation and MBAs that get between doctors and patients. Lawyers have similar issues. People in the printing and publishing business lament the Internet. And independent booksellers now all seem to work for Barnes and Noble for $8

Like Germany, Japan was devastated as a result of WWII. American bombing had destroyed industrial production, and the war had killed a high percentage of young adult males. Many homes were in ruins, and the electric and telecommunications grid was annihilated. Like Germans, the Japanese are an energetic and frugal people, and by the 1960s,

Early cars had mechanical crank starters. They didn’t work very well, were hard to use, and required the strength of a good sized man to turn them. In cold weather they sometime “kicked”, breaking the hand of the person trying to start his car. Yet even after electric starters were invented, for many years cars were