Blog

  1. Early Airmails

    Early Airmails

    Early airmail stamps hold a special place in philatelic history, marking the dawn of a new era in postal communication. These stamps were specifically issued to cover the cost of sending mail by air, reflecting the pioneering efforts to establish airmail services. Here are some notable examples of early airmail stamps:

    1. United States - 1918 "Inverted Jenny": The United States issued its first airmail stamp in 1918 to coincide with the inauguration of regular airmail service between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. The most famous among these stamps is the 24-cent "Inverted Jenny," which features a biplane flying upside-down. It is one of the most sought-after and valuable stamps in philately.

    2. United Kingdom - 1911 "First Aerial Post": The United Kingdom issued its first airmail stamp in 1911 to commemorate the "First Aerial Post" between Hendon and Windsor. The stamp,

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  2. No More Stamps??

    No More Stamps??

    The Vanishing Stamps: Why Some Post Offices Have Stopped Issuing Stamps

    In an era where technology seems to be dominating every aspect of our lives, there are some subtle changes occurring that might go unnoticed until they directly affect us. One such change that has quietly been taking place is the dwindling availability of postage stamps at certain post offices around the world. While stamps have long been synonymous with postal services, the practice of some post offices ceasing to issue stamps is a trend that has raised eyebrows and sparked discussions among both postal service aficionados and the general public. One of the latest examples would be Iceland transitioning to digital qr codes instead of classic designs.

    The Tradition of Postage Stamps

    For generations, postage stamps have been an essential part of the postal system, serving as a means of prepaying for mail delivery services. These tiny adhesive labels not only signify payment for postal

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  3. Swiss Post - La Poste Suisse

    Swiss Post - La Poste Suisse

    Switzerland, famed for its precision and efficiency, has long been a global benchmark for postal services. The journey of the Swiss Post Office is a tale of adaptation, innovation, and steadfast commitment to service. From humble beginnings to a modern, multifaceted organization, the Swiss Post Office has traversed the currents of time, evolving to meet the changing needs of society.

    Origins and Early Days: The roots of the Swiss Post Office can be traced back centuries, with the first organized postal system emerging in the 15th century. Initially, postal services were rudimentary, primarily catering to governmental and administrative needs. Communication relied heavily on messengers and horseback riders, making the process slow and inefficient.

    However, as trade and commerce flourished, so did the demand for reliable communication. Recognizing this, the Swiss authorities began to invest in infrastructure and logistics,

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  4. Foreign Catalogs

    Foreign Catalogs

    There are three main Foreign catalogs for the non English speaking European specialties-Michel for Germany and German Area, Yvert for France and French Colonies and Sassone for Italy and the Italian Area. Michel is the Mercedes of catalogs with hundreds of thousands of specialized listings in all phases of German philately with covers, blocks, paper types and cancellations all addressed and priced. Michel Deutchland Specialized is the prototype of what a specialty catalog should be and no other country's specialized catalog comes even close. Yvert's France and Colonies catalog is good, handles well though without much excitement or acceleration-sort of like a Peugeot. Yvert's listing often go little beyond Scott (especially the wonderful Scott Specialized) but still overall is a capable model. Sassone, the Italian catalog is sort of like a hybrid Maserati/Fiat. Some sections are excellent (modern printing varieties for instance) and it has thousands of listings that are beyond Scott. Th

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  5. Engraved vs Lithographed

    Engraved vs Lithographed

    If philately were an academic discipline, there would be several basic elements of understanding that stamp majors would have to master before moving to graduate level courses. High on this list would be a basic understanding of printing methods. There are many methods of transferring ink from plate to paper (and, now, even the word "plate" is far too restrictive for what amounts to a high speed ink spraying process that looks to the paper receiving it more like a car wash than a printing process), but the major printing processes all boil down to two major types-engraving, where ink is squeezed from recessed lines on the plate onto the paper, and litho-typography, in which a flat layer of ink is pressed onto the sheet.

     Engraving was the preferred method of printing stamps in the early days of philately as it was a far harder process for counterfeiters to imitate convincingly. But the major te

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  6. Curiosity and Philately

    Curiosity and Philately

    There is probably no activity more of an antidote to ignorance than philately. Ignorance is more than stupidity or incuriousness. It is deliberately lacking respect for learning and understanding as being valuable activities in a complex world.  With every hour with his stamps and covers, a philatelist is cultivating curiosity. This comes to mind when working with a specialized collection of Russian and Ukrainian local issues. Not the Zemstovs, though they are one of the more fascinating philatelic fields, but the locals that were created in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992. Many of the nation states that Russia had incorporated in the Soviet Union broke apart and became separate countries. Some tried to break away and were unable to. Other just saw the political turmoil as an opportunity to issue a few stamps and make a bit of money. Now an ignorant person might look at this collection (and it was in fifteen volumes comprising thousands of different stamps and c

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  7. Lucky Auction Purchase

    Lucky Auction Purchase

    In the 1970s Public Auctions were much more frequent (and there were far more philatelic auction companies) and there was no Internet. Auction firms sent out a thousand or so auction catalogs to their best customers and mainly solicited bids by mail. There was no email or fax machines, few phone bids and no live computer bidding  Because of these factors there was spotty coverage at many auctions and many lots really did sell cheaply.

     In 1976, I was in London bumming around a bit after college. I supported myself by doing a bit of stamps, going to auctions. But life then didn't require much support- Europe for an American in those days could be very cheap. I was sitting at a H R Harmer auction in London. Harmer was one of the "venerables"- one of several old line English auction firms that went back to the earliest days of our hobby. Their auctions were stuffy affairs and I was the only person in

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  8. Newfoundland

    Newfoundland

    The stamps of Newfoundland have always been a favorite with philatelists. The internal demand in Newfoundland itself is small because the population of that province is small but the philately of Newfoundland is interesting and has always attracted Canadian collectors, British Commonwealth collectors and US collectors. The stamps are interesting and well engraved. The first issues are very scarce and have some of the rarest stamps in philately although listing major catalog numbers based solely on paper and shade differences has always seemed silly to me. Stamps printed from the same plates and of the same denomination and color should generally be the same major catalog number and varieties of paper and shade should be minor "a" numbers. This is not the case with the first issues of Newfoundland and  collectors do not readily take to these stamps. The twentieth century issues are very well engraved and tastefully designed and have always been avidly collected. As Newfoundland was alway

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  9. Mint vs Used

    Mint vs Used

    The most basic decision that most collectors make is whether to collect stamps mint or used. In the very earliest stages of collecting either will do and, at the very highest stages, finances often force either to do. But most collectors start saving both and then gravitate to one or the other. The decision comes down to a calculation. Used stamps are usually cheaper and require less care in mounting and handling. If I were putting away stamps long term for an investment portfolio I would only select used as with mint stamps gum grading standards have changed dramatically over the years and are likely to do so further in the future. Gum can degrade over time if not stored carefully and even the smallest amount of humidity can cause toning. Since so much of the value of a mint stamp today is in  perfect gum I wouldn't want to have to worry about this as a long term investment. Used stamps are easy to store and harder to damage. You probably shouldn't try this at home but if you ever have in

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  10. Litography vs Engraving

    Litography vs Engraving

    If philately were an academic discipline, there would be several basic elements of understanding that stamp majors would have to master before moving to graduate level courses. High on this list would be a basic understanding of printing methods. There are many methods of transferring ink from plate to paper (and, now, even the word "plate" is far too restrictive for what amounts to a high speed ink spraying process that looks to the paper receiving it more like a car wash than a printing process), but the major printing processes all boil down to two major types-engraving, where ink is squeezed from recessed lines on the plate onto the paper, and litho-typography, in which a flat layer of ink is pressed onto the sheet.

     Engraving was the preferred method of printing stamps in the early days of philately as it was a far harder process for counterfeiters to imitate convincingly. But the major te

    Read more »
  11. Germany and the Complexity of Michel Catalog

    Germany and the Complexity of Michel Catalog

    The German area,  as collected by the Michel catalog is the most diverse and complicated collecting area in the world. The Michel Germany specialized catalog and the Gansachen (that is postal stationery catalogs) of German and the German Area run nearly 4000 pages and list and price nearly one million stamps and specialty pieces. A complete Germany collection has never been made and rarely even attempted. Germany dwarfs in complexity British Commonwealth and French Community collecting and rivals in complexity United States philately, though Germany far exceeds US in scope. The reasons are two. First, Germany's complex political history has created far more philatelic entities than any other philatelic specialty. There are the component States that confederated in 1870 to form modern Germany. There are the war induced issues of WW I and WW II,  post war allied and Soviet occupation issues, Colonies and more. The second reason that German area philately is so vast is that the Germans have s

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  12. Grading Evolution

    Grading Evolution

    Our hobby is just 170 years old, a mere babe by the standards of hobbies such as numismatics. But already the grading standards and the quality grades that collectors desire has undergone a profound metamorphosis, one which current generations of collectors have been spared. For the first collectors, any copy of a stamp from perfect to severely damaged would do and the earliest stamp price lists never mention quality because it didn't matter. One sees an entire genre of philatelic articles beginning about 1870 on soaking and how that is the preferred way of removing stamps from envelopes. This was the quality conscious successor to the earliest removal method of just scraping stamps off envelopes with a knife, which produced the grossly disfigured stamps that later generations just tossed. The "Good, Fair, Poor" paradigm of earliest grading gradually inflated to the "Fine, Very Fine, Extremely Fine" triumvirate that we have today. Perhaps the most significant change in the hobby over the l

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  13. US Commemorative Scarcety

    US Commemorative Scarcety

    The scarcest US commemorative in mint condition is the 10c orange perf 10 #404. Fewer of the higher value dollar denomination Columbian and Trans-Mississippi were issued than #404 but far more of the 10c were used on commercial mail and thus used and lost to collectors. Here's the story: For many years leading up to the issuance of #404 the Post Office had been receiving complaints about the perforations on United States postage stamps. The perforation gauge that was used was perf 12 and this was just too close resulting in many sheets of stamps separating on their own often even in the postal clerk's drawer. The simplest solution for this was to change the guage of the perforation so that there were fewer perforations per row and thus stamps would be more difficult to separate. This was tried for the first time on the Pamana-Pacific issue with the stamps being first issued in perf 12 (#397-400A) and then, as an experiment, in perf 10 (#401-404). No great fanfare was made over this experiment

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  14. Independence Day

    Independence Day

    Two hundred forty four years ago the thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and began a seven year war that would result in the the founding of the United States of America. Before our Revolutionary War, Great Britain thought of her American Colonies as a whole and lumped the thirteen colonies in with the sugar islands of the West Indies and the British possessions in Canada. Our revolution resulted in profound changes of thinking on the part of Britain on the value of her Colonies and the proper steps needed to retain them. Before 1776, Britain treated her colonies in a cavalier and dictatorial manor, with little regard for local populations and what was best for each. The individualization in British colonial administration that was result of the American Revolution was one of the factors that led to the British idea of issuing separate stamps for each Colony after 1840, not just sending off GB stamps and running the Colonial Post Offices as branch offices

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  15. The Impulse to Collect

    The Impulse to Collect

    There are three main conscious reasons why people collect anything and there are specific modifications of these principles about why they collect stamps in particular. First, collecting satisfies the desire to set and achieve goals. Stamp collecting is a particularly satisfying hobby in this regard in that, because of our extensive catalogs, collectors know what they need to obtain more clearly than most other collecting hobbies(try getting a complete collection of red buttons). If a collector sets a goal of obtaining a set of Famous Americans he can readily achieve it. Goals can be set at easy to very difficult levels depending on the collectors interests and needs. Second, collecting fulfills our need for orderliness. People have a need to arrange things in ways that make sense and in this regard, philately is one of the best hobbies as our albums and neat page lay out make ordering different pieces of paper easy and interesting. And third, people collect because of an aesthetic appreciation

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  16. Newspaper Stamps

    Newspaper Stamps

    Special Service stamps tell you a lot about a country. How does a country view charity? If the feeling is that the government should encourage charitable contributions to specific causes then that country will issue a lot of Semipostal stamps. Larger countries with lots of distance between cities issued a lot of airmails and special deliveries. And the United States issued over 120 Newspaper Stamps, winning the race in this category by a factor of ten over runner up Austria. Most countries never issued Newspaper stamps. None of the British Commonwealth nations did, nor did the German or French Area. The reason for the vast number of US Newspaper stamps is due to both the geographical distances between areas in the United States and a commitment since Revolution days to political discourse. Freedom of the Press is the first of the freedoms in the Bill of Rights and throughout the nineteenth century congress felt that this meant not only freedom to publish but also ease of dissemination.

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  17. Highest Face Value Stamp

    Highest Face Value Stamp

    Prices and the value of money are difficult to evaluate over time. Readers of Victorian novels know that in the late Nineteenth Century an income of about 150 Pounds a year was the minimum needed to live as a gentleman (Trollope says tartly "an embarrassed gentleman, yes, but a gentleman"). That was three Pounds a week and for that a person could rent an apartment, eat and have a part time servant. Before 1900, prices for food and clothing were proportionately much more expensive and labor was proportionately far cheaper. Sir Walter Scott writes that in his time one could engage a servant for little more than food clothing and shelter. Still, if a middle class person could live a decent life at three Pounds a week in Victorian England and the Post Office issued a stamp for five Pounds it would be the equivalent in spending power to a $1000 stamp today. This raises the question of what could such stamps possibly be used for. Mainly they was used by banks that sent quantities of cash and

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  18. Production Values

    Production Values

    Perhaps the greatest change in our hobby in the last 80 years has been in the quality of the product that we collect. Stamps have gone from miniature pieces of art that reflect the skill and technological prowess of the nation that issued them to being little more than a chit indicating payment of postage, usually with a theme to appeal to collectors. The change is not only cultural-taste and artistic standards are lower now than they used to be- but also reflect the diminished roll that letters, and consequently postage stamps, play in our society. Until about 1950 telecommunication was difficult and expensive and was only used for the most important communications. Costs of telephone use has lowered dramatically so that today the largest cost to the telecom companies is not the lines or the satellites but the actual costs of billing customers. Today, most people pay a flat monthly fee for all their telecommunications with no distinction between local and long distance. Email is essentially

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  19. Universal Postal Union

    Universal Postal Union

    By 1874 the system of international carriage of letters was a mess. Countries had to negotiate postal treaties with each other and most treaties called for cross payments where part of the postage of a letter was remitted by the sending post office to the receiving post office. This was confusing and difficult to keep tabs of but of further complexity was the cross payments to transit countries (say when a letter from the United States landed in England, was sent to Poland and then across land to Russia). Nearly thirty five years after the Penny Black, with world commerce rising, the system of cross payments just wasn't working. It was slowing down communication and as postage rates dropped it was becoming more expensive to account for the letters than to carry them. In 1874 the United States proposed an international congress to discuss the problem and what emerged was an agreement for an organization that was one of the first international cooperation organizations (it was in fact the

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  20. Italo Balbo

    Italo Balbo

    Stamps and flight have both had roles in state propaganda machines at various times and never more so than in Italy in the 1930's. Bennito Mussolini came to power in the early 1920's and one of the goals of Italian fascism was to increase the Italian sense of identity as a way of uniting the country. Air travel was new and after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927 air travel was as promoted and romanticized as space travel was in the 1960's and 1970's (and no doubt world exploration was in the 1500's). Italo Balbo was a young Italian who knew nothing about airplanes and flying but he knew about propaganda and popularity and more importantly he was politically well connected. He was made the head of the Italian Air Force in 1926 and quickly learned how to fly. His greatest philatelic significance was the 1933 flight that he organized from Rome to Chicago as part of the Century of Progress celebration held in that city (and for which the US #C18 was issued). Flying in an armada of 24 Flying

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