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  One of the most remarkable economic trends of the last several years has been the beginnings of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. In the last few years, seven of the twenty countries worldwide with the highest GDP growth rates were in sub-Saharan Africa, and only Nigeria could claim that the reason that they were in […]

A few years ago, I read an article about how smaller town diamond merchants send their stock to each other by ordinary First Class mail. The article said that outside New York, the incidence of First Class mail going astray is nearly nonexistent. Apfelbaum’s sends out thousands of packages per year, mostly through the postal

One of the most interesting philatelic areas is Danzig, now called Gedansk. Danzig is a city, or rather City State, on the shores of the Baltic Sea between Germany and Poland (which was long ruled by Russia), and part of its philatelic charm is in the many issues that were created as political control bounced

The Lone Wolf was a detective series in the 1920s about a high end burglar named Michael Lanyard who helped the police solve crimes. The series was written by Louis Joseph Vance and was made into about twenty movies in the 1930s. I happened to see one recently on TCM entitled The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date. The plot

  One of the most interesting and specialized areas of philately is the Italian area. Italian philately comprises several main areas of interest—Italian States, Italy proper, Italian Offices and Colonies, and philatelic areas traditionally allied with Italy, such as San Marino and the Vatican. There are tens of thousands of Italian area stamps to collect,

Gum has had a long relationship with printing on postage stamps. In the pre-1930 days, flat press printing meant that sheets of paper were fed into the press one by one and then the printed sheets were hung up to dry, gummed, and weighted at the corners so that as the gum contracted the stamp

The Scott catalog prices for most countries after 1940 is for stamps in mint Never Hinged condition. This is for three reasons. First, most post-1940 stamps are more common in NH than in hinged condition (especially as you come closer to the current period in time). Second, most collectors have been trained to believe that they

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

The reason you should buy your stamps from Apfelbaum is not our prices (which are very attractive) or our service and shipping (which is not only free, but is also the fastest). You should buy your stamps from Apfelbaum because we are the only stamp company that assures your complete satisfaction and safety to this degree: buy