The APS show that was held in Richmond this past weekend was quite a success. The venue was attractive and the attendance was excellent. Dealers reported brisk sales and lots of interest.
I always enjoy APS conventions and have only missed a few in the last forty years. When I was young, Apfelbaum was in part a show dealer and we had a show stock and did the bourse circuit, travelling to twenty exhibitions per year. The stamp show circuit is a world of its own. You work Thursday to Sunday, travel home on Mondays and try to take a day off before you are off to the next venue. In the 1970’s scores of dealers were on the circuit either as sellers or as buyers who combed the shows for that week’s hot items. You saw your fellow dealers more often than your family. Friendships developed and so did feuds. Two old stamp dealers of my acquaintance maintained a feud over as many years as I knew them. The origins of the fight were lost in the mist. Each told me the reasons differently and in both cases neither affront amounted, in my opinion, to more than a minor annoyance. But for them the fight became a holy crusade. At most shows they had tables either next to or across from each other and it was this way year after year. Now, it would have been easy to talk to the show coordinators and have their tables far apart but they never did. To them the glowering and hostility was part of the fun of stamp dealing. When one of the two of them got sick and retired the other quit the circuit.
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