They brought a black and white television set into our fourth grade class and we watched John Glenn’s lift off in 1962. They told us it was a big deal- the first person to orbit the earth but nothing told us it was a big deal as much as the fact that there were televisions […]
The best inventions are often the simplest and, for simplicity and usefulness, philately’s greatest invention was the stamp hinge. The hinge wasn’t actually invented, rather it evolved. The earliest collectors just licked their mint stamps to put them in their albums and made a paste to gum down their used stamps. As the Nineteenth Century progressed, collectors started
The world wide press has given extensive coverage to the problems with the Greek economy and the effect this is having on the rest of the European Union. It increasingly appears that Greece will default on its loans and either leave or be forced out of the Euro zone. This is uncharted territory for both
We have available a completely intact dealers stock in three cartons. Largely post 1940 it has things like errors (mostly coil imperfs) and even a recalled Legends of the West sheet in the original packaging. The postage has been carefully counted out by book and is over $ 14,000. And the price is only $9795, postpaid. This
United States Dealers Stock Read More »
What is striking about the first philatelic issues of most countries in the Nineteenth Century compared to the later issues is the small number of printing varieties that exist on first issues compared to the subsequent issues. Specifically, US #1 & 2 have a few minor shade varieties listed by the catalogs and several very minor
Varieties On First Issues Read More »
The United States Post Office announced last year that it was ending the previous policy that has guided postal emissions for the last century and that people no longer had to be ten years dead before they could be suitable for commemoration on US postage stamps (previously, the only exception to this policy was recently
Who Will Be First? Read More »
Every country in the world grapples with the issue of what images should go on its stamps. And this was never as important as when the first stamps of each country were issued. The essays for the first stamps of Great Britain (which were the first stamps issued) show a variety of choices from elaborate
Years ago at one of the more popular Philadelphia stamp clubs there was a man named Bob. Bob had a pretty fair philatelic knowledge, though he wasn’t nearly as capable a philatelist as he thought he was. But that wasn’t Bob’s biggest problem. No, he would come to the major club meetings and brag about what
Oakwood, Oklahoma is a tiny spot of parched prairie 100 miles north west of Oklahoma City. It is over twenty miles from the next nearest town that gets a name on google maps. Oakwood is tiny. The 2000 census listed 70 inhabitants (more people work on my floor in my office building) and a google camera shot of the