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American Philatelic Society Black Blot   Very few collectors today remember the APS Black Blot program. Begun in the 1960’s and finally ending in the early 1990’s, the Black Blot was a Seal of Disapproval given to new issues from various countries, which the APS deemed exploitive of collectors. The goal was high-minded, and the […]

One of the most idiosyncratic aspects of US philately, compared with the collecting that is done in other countries, is the collecting of plate blocks. Many countries have marginal plate numbers in the selvedges of the sheets of their printed stamps. Most United States stamps that were printed before 1894 had plate numbers in the

In the 1950s, comic books were far more than ever more exotic super heroes. Classic novels were published as illustrated comic books, and there were sub-genre of Love Comics and hybrids such as Archie comics (which straddled the “goofy/love” line). There were few areas of interest that the comic book publishers didn’t try market to,

Quality standards in our hobby have remained static for so long that there are few collectors active today who are aware that the standards that seem so normal today have really evolved over the last century of collecting. The earliest collectors had no quality standards to speak of. Any copy of a stamp, no matter

Frederick Maynard Sundman (or “Maynard” as all knew him) was one of the most successful and innovative stamp dealers of the twentieth century. Born in 1915, Sundman was a stamp dealer from the age of twenty, beginning a small mail order company which he operated out of his home. Sundman joined the army at the

No American philatelist has had more influence on our hobby than John Walter Scott. Scott became involved with stamps at a very early period and by the late 1860s was publishing a price list that he later expanded into a worldwide stamp catalog.  Scott was originally a seller of stamps, and it was only in

There were two great waves of philatelic giants—the founders and the consolidators. The founders were the Big Five present at the creation of our hobby. Philatelists such as J. Walter Scott, Stanley Gibbons, Moens in Belgium, John Luff, and Heinrich Kohler—these five philatelists created, shortly after 1850, the catalogs and the albums that essentially defined

Henry Ellis Harris was born in 1902 and became a stamp dealer at the age of 14. Stamp collecting was a very popular hobby in the early twentieth century, and Harris combined his love for the hobby with modern merchandising techniques to greatly popularize the hobby of stamp collecting.  In the process of creating a

Deciding what to do with a loved one’s stamp collection is a daunting task for most people. The person who made the collection knows best what they have, what they have spent, and has some idea how to best go about disposing of the stamp collection that they made. Family members and heirs often are