One of the most remarkable economic trends of the last several years has been the beginnings of economic growth in sub Saharan Africa. World wide last year, seven of the twenty countries with the highest GDP growth rates were in sub Saharan Africa and only Nigeria could claim that the reason that they were in this group […]
Women and men probably collect things about equally. Women however just don’t collect stamps. Philately has long been a man’s domain. After the passing of the “timbramania” phase about 1860, the vast majority of stamp collectors, and certainly the vast majority of more serious philatelists have been men. Of the hundreds of early philatelic books and articles that I’ve read only
Women And Philately Read More »
Stamps are a product of four factors-paper, printing, perfs and gum. The first three get alot of press. Gum, however, is usually only written about if it is present or if it has been fraudulently reapplied. Stamp gums were originally derived from gum Arabic, a extract of the Acacia tree. These trees are tapped like Maple
Thematic stamp collecting along conceptual lines has never really caught hold. There was a great gold medal collection making the rounds of the APS Champion of Champion shows several years ago entitled “Murder” where the collector sought to portray how murder was shown on stamps from individual murderers to genocide (such as the Holocaust). But few
In the 1970s Public Auctions were much more frequent (and there were far more philatelic auction companies) and there was no Internet. Auction firms sent out a thousand or so auction catalogs to their best customers and mainly solicited bids by mail. There was no email or fax machines, few phone bids and no live computer bidding Because
A Great Auction Purchase Read More »
Most people involved in this hobby are glad to tell you of their great finds. Last week John Murray died and he was involved in one of the great finds of the last thirty years in the entire hobby of philately. And it was at my expense. In 1995, I bought a pretty mediocre quality
The One That Got Away Read More »
The stamps of Newfoundland have always been a favorite with philatelists. The internal demand in Newfoundland itself is small because the population of that province is small but the philately of Newfoundland is interesting and has always attracted Canadian collectors, British Commonwealth collectors and US collectors. The stamps are interesting and well engraved. The first
The popularity of a country’s stamps varies with the popularity of the government in power. Japanese stamps were very popular in the 1920’s and fell off tremendously in the the 1930’s and 1940’s before renewing their popularity after World War II. The stamps of Iran were very popular until the last twenty years. They are
The world is just a few dictators away from a radically different Arab world. Americans are fond of thinking that it is something peculiar to our character that has made this country great. Perhaps so. But never underestimate the significance of good government (Good government believe it or not is what we have. It is