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I just got back from the 2015 APS show in Grand Rapids. It was a very good show in a very nice venue, and I have two broad observations that I’d like to make. First, the show was very well attended, and the collectors that I saw seemed engaged and energetic about the hobby. The […]

Plate block collecting has long been one of the most popular specialties here in the United States. Many other countries have and have had plate markings in the margins of their sheets. Often these are plate numbers or inscriptions that might ordinarily be of interest. But only in the U.S. (and since WWII, UN and

There is one stamp that tops all the philatelic popularity polls as America’s most popular stamp. And it has done so for over a century. It is the $1 TransMississippi issue of 1898. As you can see it’s a beautiful stamp, carefully engraved. But the story of how it reached its pinacle of popularity has

There are five main stamp album makers, each of whom makes a complete set of worldwide specialty albums. In order of cost and quality, the publishers are Minkus, Scott, Davo, Lindner, and Lighthouse, each album having their own advantages. Minkus is the residual publisher from the great Minkus stamp business. At one time, Minkus had

Americans tend to have a limited view of the politics and policies of other nations. The policies of Estonia and the feelings of the Estonian people (and the other Baltic States) to the German invasion of 1941 is a perfect illustration of this. Estonia is inhabited by an ethnically and linguistically different people than their

The Red Cross was created by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1859 Dunant was near the battlefield of Solferino and was horrified by the suffering of the 40,000 troops that had been killed or wounded in that battle. There were no medical facilities whatsoever, and the wounded were left among the

The first stamps of Greenland are some of the most interesting and popular stamps in the hobby. They are parcel post stamps issued for use on packages, and they are the world’s first stamps with Polar Bears pictured on them. They were first issued in 1905, and a complete mint set catalogs about $1,200, but

The “colonial era” is something that few people have much awareness of anymore. But, from 1700-1950, most of the world’s land mass was administered as colonies by four main European countries—Great Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain. At one point or another in the last three hundred years these four countries had geopolitical control of all

The Saarland is an area in western Germany boarding France. It has traditionally been one of the major industrial areas in Europe with a skilled and energetic workforce and ready access to coal, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the main fuel used in manufacturing. When WWI ended (and Germany collapsed more