A question that Americans are going to have to answer in the next few years is whether we want to keep our post offices open and have them continue their daily trips serving us all with mail. We have reluctantly made this decision with Amtrak. Rail travel is not a money maker but we have decided that the benefits […]
Amtrak and The Post Office Read More »
The high point of stamp journalism was in the 1930’s. Scores of weekly and monthly philatelic periodicals existed, many of them only a few pages and many of the journals existing for only a few issues. The Great Depression put many people out of work and printing companies had tremendous excess capacity so there were
This article about Pay Pal requiring a buyer to destroy an item he thought was counterfeit rather than returning it occurred in the violin collecting field but has interest for stamp collectors. Counterfeits are a problem in every collector field but raise many interesting issues in philately. First, philately has counterfeits that were created to defraud collectors.
Every United States collector wants the United States Graf Zeppelin set. Issued over 80 years ago the set was sold to pay the postage on zeppelin flights that originated in the United States. Zeppelin mail was intended to be an alternative to airmail and offered the ability to carry large quantities of mail on transatlantic
United States Graf Zeppelins Read More »
I read today that Peter Holcombe has passed away. Peter was one of the dwindling few of world wide dealer/experts that used to be prominent in the hobby. Peter was born in England and lived the last thirty years of his life in Switzerland. For most of his life he was an active dealer but
Every country has peculiarities of its specialization. The Germans have coil numbers printed on the back of stamps and collect their coils in strips of eleven to prove that the stamps didn’t come from a sheet which was printed with rows no larger than ten. The French collect gutter pairs with plate numbers, called millisimes.
Lou Robbins also was inducted into the APS Hall of Fame this year and was another old time philatelist with whom I had a life long relationship. Lou was 98 when he died and had been living in assisted living for many years. Lou was primarily a stamp auction agent. A stamp auction agent in the
I opened my January American Philatelist yesterday and saw that F.Burton Sellers was one of the winners of the American Philatelic Society’s Hall of Fame award this year. Unlike baseball’s Hall of Fame which is for the living and dead alike, The APS’s Hall of Fame is only for deceased philatelists who have had a
Economic statistics in recent months indicate that Europe is slipping into recession. This is more or less government policy as the response to the Euro debt crisis has been austerity which has reduced demand and output and is now causing unemployment and recession. The effect of a European recession on the stamp market will be
The New European Recession Read More »