The two most Southern British areas of influence-Australia and South Africa- were also the latest to confederate and begin issuing postage stamps as a single geographic unit. South Africa confederated in 1910 and before that was made up of the Boer dominated Transvaal, Orange Free State, and Stellaland and British dominated Cape of Good Hope. […]
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Special Service stamps tell you a lot about a country. How does a country view charity? If the feeling is that the government should encourage charitable contributions to specific causes then that country will issue a lot of Semipostal stamps. Larger countries with lots of distance between cities issued a lot of airmails and special
The first of the famous three stamp triptych of the 1920s-the Pilgrim set of 1920-has its centenary in just a few years. These three sets- the Pilgrim set, the Huguenot-Walloon set and the Lexington-Concord set- defined the commemorative issues of the 1920’s and as with most commemoratives displayed the self image that America wished to
Prices and the value of money are difficult to evaluate over time. Readers of Victorian novels know that in the late Nineteenth Century an income of about 150 Pounds a year was the minimum needed to live as a gentleman (Trollope says tartly “an embarrassed gentleman, yes, but a gentleman”). That was three Pounds a
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The Philadelphia Stamp Show was held in Valley Forge, PA last month and it was a small shadow of its old self. Thirty or forty dealers plied their mostly tired wares and the exhibits looked like the same group that has been competing for gold since the California Gold Rush of ’49. Every years shows
The relationship between quality and price in our hobby is ever changing. Quality standards are constantly evolving and what people look for today is quite different from the quality standards of the early days of our hobby. The earliest generation of collectors were space fillers with little or no regard for quality. Early dealer price
Perhaps the greatest change in our hobby in the last 80 years has been in the quality of the product that we collect. Stamps have gone from miniature pieces of art that reflect the skill and technological prowess of the nation that issued them to being little more than a chit indicating payment of postage,
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By 1874 the system of international carriage of letters was a mess. Countries had to negotiate postal treaties with each other and most treaties called for cross payments where part of the postage of a letter was remitted by the sending post office to the receiving post office. This was confusing and difficult to keep
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There are very few areas of philately that can’t be specialized to the max. Take the early postage dues of Romania for instance. Most collectors have just a single example of each of these common stamps but they are known with many perf varieties and especially scarce compound perfs (perforated say 14 at side by
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