My grandfather, Earl P L Apfelbaum, was born in 1905 and died in 1985. He was born in Philadelphia and though he travelled extensively, at the time of his death his home was only a few miles from where he was born. He collected stamps from his earliest childhood and this was an interest he […]
People are always wondering what stamps make good investments. I don’t usually like to push our hobby this way but there is one area that I think will do well. I don’t recommend sets like US Zeppelins or German Posthorns although these sets have performed well in the past and might do so in the
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The period 1922-1925 of the Weimar Republic in Germany is one of the most interesting in all of philately. Because of WWI debt and reparations that Germany was required to pay under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany began to inflate its currency in the early 1920’s. The purpose of this was to make the debt
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The Canal Zone was a tiny area and administrative district that was carved out of the Republic of Panama in the early years of the twentieth century for the purpose of building an canal across the isthmus of Panama. The political rationalization for the Canal Zone was that the United States was going to put
Every United States stamp issued after 1861 is valid for use as postage. No one would use a $5 Columbian on a package but you could. Most of the hundreds of millions of dollars of mint postage stamps sold to collectors over the last fifty years is still around waiting to be used on mail.
One of the most noticeable changes in philately in the last forty years has been the change in the importance of cover collecting. When I first started stamp dealing, First Day covers, Special Event covers, First Flights, Airmail covers, Space covers, and Zeppelin covers were all collected by far more people than they are today.
After forty years and millions of auction lots, I still get excited by many different kinds of stamps. What I would collect is stamps that I rarely see. For instance, yesterday I wrote up a Morocco collection complete mint 1956-2000. It cataloged about $800 and will sell for about $200. It contained over 800 mint
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The American Philatelic Society has begun to digitize their library. This involves scanning books a la Google and making the library’s vast collection of books and periodicals available online. It’s a smart move and one that unfortunately was not foreseen when the society changed main offices a few years ago largely to house the library’s
The Euro has declined against the dollar by nearly 20% in the last six months. This is good news for American collectors. Though everything we buy and sell is denominated in dollars, most of the demand for better European stamps come from their home markets. A set of Austrian Renner sheets sells for about 1000