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Elliot Perry may well have been the preeminent philatelist in an era that had some pretty good stamp scholars. Perry began his most famous series of articles in 1931. Entitled “Pat Paragraph”, these scholarly articles continued until the late 1950’s. Collected and republished in 1971 they run to over 650 pages of dense information and […]

We, the aging baby boomers, have seen prices rise considerably over time. Everyone has their stories of 50c movies and 25c hotdogs. Prices and the value of money are difficult to evaluate over time. But readers of Victorian novels know that in the late nineteenth century an income of 150 Pounds a year was enough

A little more than five years ago Bill Welch died. He was 67. I first met Bill at the 1980 APS convention and we were friends for thirty years. Bill at the time was editor and publisher of the Center County Daily Times, the newspaper in State College, Pa. He was mayor of State College

For many years we have been searching for a world wide expert who can expertize the entire non US world. For the US area there is the Philatelic Foundation, but they really don’t do much with Foreign stamps. We wanted an expert who expertized in a large number of countries and areas, who didn’t indelibly

Essays are designs for stamps that don’t get issued. If they are issued, these designs are then called Proofs. Essays come in two main types – design essays and production essays. Design essays are artist’s productions for proposed stamps. These designs may come as a result of an authorized postal authority stamp production process, where

1910 Maurice Apfelbaum, Earl’s father, listed his occupation in the 1910 US census as “stamp dealer”. By 1910 stamp collecting was already a well respected worldwide hobby boasting scores of catalogs and hundreds of world wide journals. Stamp collectors in 1910 almost always collected revenue stamps and Cut Squares of the countries they collected and

About twenty years ago I had an appointment to see a widow. Her husband had died a few months before and had told her that his stamp collection was worth very little but that she should call me and have me look at it during my next trip to her area. When I offered her

Presidential topical collections in general are not very popular largely because there is so little philatelic material that has been issued for most Presidents (quick – name three stamps that have Garfield or Coolidge on them). And if it wasn’t for the 1931 Presidential set there would be no US stamps with Taft or Harrison

There are four main categories of prepaid labels that have been issued to indicate prepayment for a service or tax. They are postage stamps, revenue stamps, telegraph stamps and telephone stamps.   Worldwide issues of these stamps vary, but overall the number of postage stamps greatly exceeds the number of revenues, telephone and telegraph stamps.