Forty years ago the stamp selling world was divided into four main methods of sale. There were retail stamp shops, stamp auctions, dealer price lists and stamp shows. Apfelbaum attended over thirty shows a year as bourse dealers and I did most of them. The show life was a hard life. Packing up your stock […]
Chile is the wealthiest country in Latin America. The country lies along a narrow strip of land along the west coast of the South American continent bordered by the Andes mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Chile’s climate ranges from some of the driest hottest deserts to frozen Antarctic landscapes. It’s wealth
The Arab spring which started out so peacefully with the change of the governments of Egypt and Tunisia took a turn for the more violent this summer when NATO was involved in the overthrow of the Libyan government. Libyan stamps have now begun their fourth phase. First, there were the issues of the Italian Colony
The concept of envy has been in the press recently in a non philatelic context. Envy is the feeling of pain at that which someone else has and which you wish that you had. Philately is one of the hobbies one would think would be most prone to envy. After all most collectors are after
Color and shades are one of the most overdone areas of our hobby. During the earliest years of collecting, before 1900, there were simply not enough new stamp issues for the amount of time that collectors had to devote to our hobby. Collectors then parsed and refined their specialties and one way to do this
Postage Dues are one of what are called special service stamps, that is stamps issued for special postal purposes. Such stamps include Parcel Posts, which are stamps intended to be used on packages, Officials which are stamps used on government mail and all of the array of Newspapers and postal tax stamps that grace the back
Middle Eastern stamps are very appealing for a few reasons. First they are politically fascinating. Nearly all of the Middle East was under Turkish control until after WW I. The breakup created a power vacuum which brought Britain and France into play both with and against local populations in setting up new governments. The philately reflects
Like most collectors, different stamps take me back to different times in my life. In the 1960’s my parents sent me to overnight camp and the stamp they sent me with to post my letters home was the 1963 Food For Peace stamp. Every time I see this stamp in a collection I have memories of
Observers of philatelists have long believed that stamp collectors are a very conservative group politically. We don’t have Gallup polls, but through letters to the editor of philatelic publications and personal conversations most of us believe our group to be well to the right on the political spectrum. True we have our liberal outliers but if
Political Orientation of Stamp Collectors Read More »