Over the last century, hardly a year has gone by without some occurrence at the APS upsetting some of the members and creating a mini-crisis in which people say they are reevaluating the importance of the society to their collecting. Now is no different and it provides a good opportunity to examine the value of APS membership in the modern age. Our company has always avidly supported the APS. Before the ubiquity of credit cards, the symbiotic relationship between mainstream stamp dealers and the APS is hard to overemphasize. Auction bidders had no references other than APS membership. And we found over the years that APS members were good as gold as far as credit risk was concerned. So while mainstream stamp dealers always felt a desire to promote philately by promoting the APS, encouraging APS membership also made running our businesses easier and less risky. And the Apfelbaum firm have been advertisers in the American Philatelist for over fifty years. We have enlisted hundreds of new members into the society and my grandfather was a vice president of the society and won the APS’s prestigious Luff award.
Until a decade ago, a serious collector needed to belong to the APS. The magazine was interesting and indispensable (it still is very good). The insurance plan was necessary because it was costly and cumbersome to add stamp insurance to a home owner