Everyone associated with our hobby has their favorite terms and their least favorite ones. Many collectors find fault with the term “never hinged” mostly because it doesn’t describe what is really meant. People seeking “never hinged” stamps want perfect gum so that a stamp with disturbed gum that is “never hinged” is not NH at all. […]
Anyone who was a Cub Scout or a Boy Scout in the 1950s and 1960s received a free monthly copy of Boys Life magazine delivered in the mail. The magazine was for boys 7-17 and offered light reading, projects and an array of stamp collecting ads. Companies like Jamestown and Kenmore and Mystic and H
Our nation has become far less regional than it was forty years ago. People were born, raised and died in the South or the North East and many people never moved very far from where they were born. Today, many of us are transplants or from families that have moved. And millions moving south when they retire has also
Regionalism in Philately of Yore Read More »
Some thirty-five years ago a customer called me from New York about a collection. He was from Nicaragua and had collected the stamps of that country all of his life. The collection was magnificent, in over twenty volumes, with thousands of stamps and covers. We negotiated a price, but any time you put five figure
Second chances sometimes work out in life, but they almost never do in philately. The 1930 Zeppelin stamps were issued in 1930 and their high face value during the Great Depression meant that many collectors had to forgo buying them and that many people who bought them could only afford one set and not put any away for
Philatelists are well aware of how interests change throughout life. The games of childhood give way to the pressures and duties of adulthood which in turn meld into the aspirations of old age. Most collectors have seen this. They collected as kids, found their interest in philately wain during their active work and parenting years and
The Battle of the Generations Read More »
Each generation of stamp collecting is defined by the wants of (what I call) movement collectors, that is the serious collectors of that generation, traditionally mostly older men who do most of the buying and selling in the hobby. These movement collectors are largely men who have gotten back into the hobby in middle and
During the Nineteenth century, there were two large economically developed nations that had large territories with disparate ethnic groups occupying them. One, the United States was rapidly growing west with many immigrants and local people emigrating to different areas. The other, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had numerous ethnicities and languages under one government umbrella with much internal
There are two basic types of predictions when it comes to philatelic investments. There is the country call where you use economic growth, demographics and education levels to make predictions about whether the general price level of a country should move. This is the rationale behind the predictions of increased growth of Chinese, Indian and Russian stamps