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Seigniorage is the profit that governments make on securities that they issue, on which they don’t pay interest, and that are retained unused by the public. Cash in mattresses represents a form of seigniorage, and, more than anything else, old face value postage stamps held by collectors do as well. The money that collectors have […]

Among the most interesting issues in philately are the classic first issues of Japan called the Dragons. Japan was a closed society for about three hundred years before 1854. Japanese leaders had made the decision that they wanted no contact with outsiders (as they saw what foreigners were doing to China), and the penalty for

Of the major worldwide powers in the philately era (that is, since 1840), the least imperialistic has been the United States. Great Britain and France had between them hundreds of imperial philatelic entities. Germany was a big player, and even Italy, which had more of an appetite for conquest than the digestion, had fifty or

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 Champions 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

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 “timbremania” 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

The value of most United States stamps have been falling over the last twenty years, and the CPI has been rising. Critics have claimed that the CPI overemphasizes increases in food, fuel, and housing (until the last few years, at least). We have not understood that price increases have been commodity driven and that many existing goods and non-commodity goods

There is one entire country under the United States collecting umbrella that has issued hundreds of stamps, which is popular on two continents, and which is completable by even collectors of modest means. The country is the Ryukyu Islands which were captured during WWII by the United States at an enormous loss of life and

Many collectors spend a great deal of money on their hobby and don’t have a great deal to show for it. Your money is yours to do with as you please (after all, this is America), but most people take some satisfaction in getting their money’s worth when they buy something and, if not always getting

Dave and Jenny were older when I first met them in the early 1970s. My first job at the company was working in the shop (we had one then), and Dave and Jenny were regulars. They had married late, and because of the economic distress of the Depression had put off children until that wasn’t