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United States coils have always presented a problem to stamp collectors. The first problem was whether they should be collected at all, at least as major numbers with spaces in all the stamp albums. US coils were some of the first worldwide coils to be issued and were done so at the behest of large […]

One of the constants in history is the malleability of political boundaries. In America, we have become a bit inured to this fact because our own geography has been so steady, adding only Hawaii and Alaska to our country in the last century. But Europe is used to change, and nowhere in Europe has there been more

Dear John,        I’m now back from Vietnam and can provide some comments about how I acquired this collection of Vietnamese stamps. Essentially, stamp collecting exists in Vietnam, as it does worldwide, but at a low level. There are no retailers of stamps of which I’m aware, or auction houses, and most people

Imagine a company, which like the Scott publishing company, (so dominant in United States philately) is preeminent as its national stamp publisher. As well as issuing a general worldwide catalog, they are especially known as the publisher of the national specialty catalog which is used by nearly all native philatelists and millions of foreign ones. But in addition to this, they also

Cover collecting did not begin at the same time as did stamp collecting. Philately had its start in earnest about 1860, and, really, until about 1910, cover collecting was something collectors did when they didn’t have the time to wash the stamps they needed for their collections off the envelopes on which they had bought

Several years ago, President Obama made a gaffe and was widely criticized for his statement regarding the appearance the Attorney-General of California, Kamala Harris. Most philatelists are middle aged men (in fact over 90% of serious collectors are male) and most of us no doubt don’t see what the fuss is all about. The President

When I was an annoying teenager helping out at the Apfelbaum stamp store in the 1960s, every Saturday brought in the fascinating Ken Whittle. Ken was the kind of philatelist that you saw a lot of then. Ken was the archetype of the “solitudinous collector” (or SC). SCs are people for whom philately is very

In 1948 Germany was in ruins. Destruction caused by the war was nearly total and even three years after the war many Germans were hungry. The United States government put forward the Marshal Plan and the United States pumped the current day equivalent of $500 billion into Europe to rebuild that continent. Republicans and Democrats

What Can Be Done: Aden is an excellent country to collect for many reasons. First, Aden’s stamp issues are few. The first stamps were not issued until 1937 and the last issues were in 1965. Scott lists only 75 stamps and even including the issues of the Aden States of Kathiri and Quaiti there are