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The world was very different in 1960 than it is today. The universe was only four billion years old, a considerable age but adolescent compared to the nearly 14 billion years astronomers think it is today. Black holes hadn’t been theorized or discovered. There was less documentation to prove evolution, as DNA had only been worked out a […]

Probably nine out of ten philatelic forgeries were created in the nineteenth century. There were three primary reasons for this. First, stamps that were issued in the earliest period (before there were many stamp collectors) never existed in sufficient quantities in even the limited market by 1890. Second, early philatelic standards did not view forgeries

 Preprinted labels as collected by philatelists come in three broad categories: postage stamps, revenues, and Cinderellas. Postage stamps are collected by all philatelists. They are the major stamp issues of each country and are issued for the prepayment of postage. Postage Stamps are listed in many major worldwide catalogs. Collecting postage stamps has a long history and

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,

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

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

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. A while back, we were called in on a case of philatelic gluttony gone wild. The

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

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