Uncategorized

Every country has sub specialties that are avidly collected by internal collectors, but which foreign specialist collectors of those countries never really warm too. As an auctioneer you can see this in bidding patterns and where certain stamps eventually sell to. Ordinary Great Britain stamps in our auctions sell to Americans, Canadians, Britons and Europeans. […]

For stamp dealers coming of age in the 1960s the stamp world was replete with Europeans who had escaped from Hitler and Stalin. Most were Jews, though looking back through the less opaque lens of our time, I know several were political escapees and at least one was fortunate enough to get out or he would have

The three great scourges of humanity have historically been war, famine, and pestilence. Modern technology though seems to have solved the problems of the devastation of two of these. In the last two centuries over 100 million people have died in famines. But fertilization, irrigation and genetic engineering have today made famine more of a byproduct of war than

The growth of Asian philately has undermined traditional thinking about where new collectors come from. The traditional model has been the evolutionary model – children (usually boys) introduced to the hobby and collecting in their youth become re enamored with stamps in middle to old age. This paradigm has described the traditional collecting arc in

Let’s suppose most people had too much money and needed so badly to lose some of it that they offered courses in how to lose it. I can’t speak of what they would teach when the course concerned non philatelic areas, but when the subject came to stamp collecting there is no doubt that the

Perhaps the greatest American philatelist was John N Luff. Born in 1860 and a collector from childhood, he was involved in US philately in its very earliest years. Luff became a professional philatelist in his twenties and was the President of the Scott Stamp and Coin Company and an editor of the Scott catalog. He

In the nineteenth century Malaysia was like India, an amalgam of independent states nominally aligned under a central government. One of the most interesting of these states was Sarawak. This was a country carved out of Borneo for Sir James Brooke, a British adventurer who helped the Sultan of Brunei against an insurrection. This was

In 2012, F.Burton Sellers was one of the winners of the American Philatelic Society’s Hall of Fame award for that year. Unlike baseball’s Hall of Fame which is for the living and dead alike, the APS’s Hall of Fame is only for deceased philatelists who have had a measurable impact on our hobby.  Bud (as