Here’s a fun little thing that just passed my desk. The Mercury Stamp Company was run in Germany before WWII by Mueller, Friedl and Herbert Bloch. They sold stamps, but most of their business was expertizing and they were good. They maintained a several hundred volume reference collection which became part of the Philatelic Foundation’s reference collection when Herbert Bloch died in the early 1980’s. Bloch was Jewish and he moved Mercury to the United States in the late 1930’s where he did expertizing and worked for the famed H R Harmer firm (he was the chief cataloger of the FDR collection and the Caspary collection when they were sold). Bloch resumed his own business as Mercury in the mid 1950’s and here is a cool auction lot in its entirety that was sold by him in 1955. The catalog value of these stamps then was $21.25 and the lot sold for four bucks. Today the stamps on this page catalog $2390. This will be sold as one lot in our next Public Auction #1090.
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