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The last of the winter stamp auctions are over and the results have been impressive. Auctions both here and throughout the country have shown the stamp market completely recovered from the recession doldrums that began three years ago. The number of bidders is way up and prices are higher almost across the board. Ebay sellers […]

A successful religion, besides having appealing theological answers, needs to have a broad psychological umbrella in order to achieve popularity. People come in all psychic shapes and sizes and a successful religion needs to have an attraction to each. To name just three types (and of course most people are a mixture of types), there

There were two main stamp issuing models in the mid nineteenth century- one based on the model espoused by Great Britain and the other on the model in place in the United States. Postage stamps were a form of money and were seen as a prepaid government obligation- sort of a bearer bond coupon. So

Stamps not only exist to facilitate postal communication, but also have political purposes. The French and Portuguese Colonial administrations used postal issues to enforce political claims in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and this is why there are so many small colony issues. A political entity that issues postage stamps is presumed to

The classic stamps of Finland are unlike any of the other stamps of Europe. The first issues are very simple in design and have a crudeness that is only matched by the Cotton Reels of British Guiana or Indian Native States. The second issues are stamps picturing the Finnish Coat of Arms and have the

Despite the unpopularity of its first commemorative set, the Columbian Exposition issue of 1893, the United States Post Office commemorated the 1898 Trans Mississippi Exposition with their own set of commemorative stamps in 1898.(And Expositions, which were precursors of World Fairs, were very popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, happening every few

There were several concerns that were raised against issuing postage stamps when Rowland Hill advanced the idea in the late 1830’s. Most of the objections were of the “not invented here” variety which is part of a normal human resistance to change. But three major objections -counterfeiting, reuse of postage stamps and accountancy issues- were

The Columbian Exposition set of 1893 (Scott #230-245) was the world’s first commemorative set and it has become one of the most popular sets not only in United States philately but in the world. But this was not always so. Stamp collectors tend to be a conservative group (at least in their philatelic tastes) and

In 2007 the APS commissioned a marketing study. The results have been published online at the APS website http://www.stamps.org/almanac/SurveyReport.pdf . The purpose of the study was to determine who joins the APS, why they join, why they stay and what they want as member services to keep them happy. The study also addressed the demographics