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While Francois Fournier was a philatelic facsimile maker whose work fools only novices or collectors who have never seen the real thing, Jean de Sperati spent his life creating forgeries designed to undermine the most knowledgeable philatelists. Even his book that he wrote Philatelie sans Experts (Philately without Experts) shows his prime motivation was the thrill of […]

Philatelic scandals come in three sizes—small, medium, and large. The work of Francois Fournier, prolific forger from Switzerland, ranks as a major philatelic scandal. He made hundreds of thousands of reproductions of many of the most popular and collected stamps in the hobby and defrauded, either directly or indirectly, tens of thousands of collectors out

The situation took place couple of years ago, but may as well have happened yesterday, we got a call from a Thrift Shop in the Hatboro area, a small town just a few miles from our office. The shop had been given a collection that they felt was pretty valuable, and they wanted us to look at

It is a curious fact, mostly to do with poorly designed and implemented rules, that banking crises in tiny countries can bring the world financial system nearly to collapse. Places like Iceland and Cyprus, which were more well known to philatelists than to the general public, have been given the power (by the European Union’s bizarrely lax banking rules) to

Most American stamp dealers try to do pretty much the same thing  to stock their business. They buy collection lots, usually at auction or from wholesale price lists. The way this works, when it is done properly, is to buy a  collection and then break it into a number of smaller units that appeal more

Open your newspaper or look online, and hardly a day goes by in which some new CNN or Bloomberg poll isn’t measuring some aspect of American life. How much time do we spend watching TV? Or exercising? Or intending to exercise as we watch TV? Nearly every aspect of our lives is polled and measured and

When I was an annoying teenager helping out at the Apfelbaum stamp store in the 1960s, every Saturday brought in the fascinating Ken Whittle. Ken was the kind of philatelist that you saw a lot of then. He was the archetype of the “solitudinous collector” (or SC). SC’s are people for whom philately is very important

Philatelic popularity began a long, measurable ascent about 1900. An historian can see the hobby taking off, and we know that the numbers of collectors increased because we see an increase in the number of philatelic magazines, in the quantity of different stamp albums, increased membership in collector societies and more stamp dealers. As these

One of the constants in history is the malleability of political boundaries. In America, we have become a bit inured to this fact because our own geography has been so steady, adding only Hawaii and Alaska to our country in the last century. But Europe is used to change, and nowhere in Europe has there been more