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Remember how you organized your day in 1970? Your clock radio alarm went off and you listened to a bit of news or some music while the percolator made coffee. The morning newspaper was at the front door and you read that before going off to work. At your office you did your professional tasks while looking forward to a date later that night with your Apfelbaum Auction catalog, or Linns, or whatever philatelic item would come in the mail that day. People's lives were compartmentalized and the change in this aspect of our lives is probably why you hear so little about conversations around the water cooler anymore. They no longer exist, as the Information Age has allowed us access to who and what we like, whenever we want. No more waiting to go home to read the news; It was reported today that 85% of adults use their phones to get news updates numerous times per day. People no longer wait until they are off work to engage in philatelic matters; Stamp Auction Network reports its busiest time

Angie was in her early forties and had began collecting in a serious way after her husband died. She was in social service work, comfortable financial circumstances, and was an interesting and attractive woman. Will was a few years older, a widower, attorney and also an avid collector. Both would come to our office every couple of months and it took a bit of time for me to put together what a great a match this would be. Here were two serious collectors, each well educated, interesting and fun, of the same religious background and in similar places with their kids. What's more they both collected the same area-Butterflies on Stamps. It seemed like a match made in heaven and one afternoon when they were both at my office I introduced them. They seemed to hit it off well enough and were animated in their conversation. As I walked by a bit later I heard them make plans to have dinner together one night the following week. I was very proud of my (philatelic) matchmaking ability. A few weeks la

Having a small business going into retirement can be a very nice part time activity. Using your collection duplicates and carefully adding to your stock can help you build an inventory that is salable and desireable. Here are few ground rules for making it work. First, stick to selling the stamps of one country or topic. Success in stamp dealing depends on repeat business and, since most collectors collect one or two countries, by only selling one country you maximize your chances of establishing a continuing business relationship with each customer. Second, have a presence on eBay. It's hard to overemphasize what a boon eBay has been to the casual and newer dealer. In the years before the Internet it could take decades to have the market penetration in stamp dealing that new dealers have instantaneously because of eBay. I would stick to the eBay store rather than auctions, as the store lets you offer lower priced items more advantageously and allows more leisurely perusal by prospective bu

One area where the Scott catalog is inconsistent and unreliable concerns shades. Most stamps of the Nineteenth Century exist in numerous shades. The reason is simple. Ink colors were hard to match and when different printings of the same stamps were made, while the printers attempted to match the inks, there was no foolproof way of matching the color exactly from one printing to the next. The Scott catalog on US stamps attempts to list most of the major shades and usually they are listed as minor varieties which is what they are. But sometimes the shades are a bit more startling or glamorous and the early catalog editors made them into entirely different Scott numbers. One of the more egregious examples of this is the Pink variety of the three cent 1861, which was given it's own catalog number (#64) as opposed to the regular red brown shade of #65. The pink is really just an early printing of #65 and it is a hard shade for many collectors to identify. The color is changeable. I have seen

Over the course of the history of our hobby, collector attitudes towards quality have changed significantly. In the early days of our hobby little attention was paid to even the most rudimentary principles of quality. Any stamp, no matter how damaged, was collectible and we see early collections that have items in them that are little more than just pieces of stamps. Collectors today usually collect with a consistency of quality. If a collector is a VF collector most of his stamps are of this high grade. But old time collections often have VF stamps next to very defective items. As the Twentieth Century evolved, collectors became more and more quality conscious to where, by 1970, many collectors were purchasing only the best quality. The last forty years have seen a shift in the emphasis on quality. There is still a subset of collectors who demand, and are willing to pay for, the very highest quality. But the modern technology and high production standards of philatelic items for nearly o

Stamp differences, the characteristics that determine which stamp is which, can be quantified into two types-the visually apparent and the equipment driven. Visually apparent differences-design difference, shades, perfs (or imperf) appeal to nearly all collectors whereas equipment driven differences such as watermarks and fluorescent varieties appeal to more limited numbers. US collectors are quite spoiled in this regard. US stamps were only watermarked for thirty years (out of  165 years of US stamps) and there are only two watermark types to recognize. But areas where watermark varieties are significant have always had a fall off in collector popularity as most collectors

One of the earliest objections to Rowland Hill's idea for a gummed label that indicated prepayment of postage was the fear that such a label could be soaked off and reused. A postage stamp is one of the simplest examples of a bearer certificate-anyone who possesses it can use it to mail a letter and the fear of reuse was very real. Postage of a British penny in 1840, when wages of a pound a week would support a family of four with ease, was the equivalent of perhaps $5 today so such fear had a real basis in fact. The first stamps were cancelled with Maltese cross cancellations which provided a sometimes disfiguring obliteration and the town from which the letter was posted placed its date and town stamp that was used in the stampless cover period on the same letter next to the stamp. This procedure was followed in the United States when we began to issue stamps except that the type of cancellation that was used was left to the individual postmasters. That is why throughout the Nineteenth

The story of the 1893 Columbian Exposition issue is well known. World's Fairs, which was what the Columbian Exposition was, were a big thing until the advent of television and theme parks (in fact the last great US World Fair, the 1964 World's fair in New York, had the first version of the "It's a Small World" ride that was incorporated into Disney world). World's fairs were a chance to see the latest innovations, and companies and nations vied with presentations to awe and impress. In 1893 the United States Post Office wanted to do just that, and as part of their exhibit they issued a new set of stamps commemorating Columbus' discovery of the new world. It was a sixteen stamp set, well designed and well printed, and the Post Office thought that collectors would be delighted. It wasn't the last time the Post Office got this wrong.

One of the great profit centers for mail order companies has always been their postage and handling charges. The idea is a good one for the business involved but not so great for the customer. Why mail order companies should be able to get away with charging for postage and handling is kind of odd. Traditional retailers don't have stocking fees or store rent and clerk fees. It always has felt like a business's attempt to pass on their cost of doing business to their customers.

Among the most interesting stamps that exist in our hobby are the stamps of the German States. What we call Germany today is a very recent political invention. The area of Germany was never part of the Roman Empire, and so the various Germanic tribes that occupied and conquered that area were never unified. As the Middle Ages progressed the area was unified under Charlemagne and then under the political hodge-podge that was the Holy Roman Empire. But by the early Nineteenth Century the political climate of Germany was very diffuse with many principalities calming jurisdiction over the area.

The degree of difficulty of a philatelic specialty is determined by three components. First is the intrinsic scarcity of the material, second the cost involved, and third the number of specialized striations into which the field has been separated. Scarcity and cost are related. Scarcity is an intrinsic value related to the amount of material that is available to collectors. It is derived from the numbers that were printed and more importantly the numbers that were saved and have been passed down to stamp collectors. Cost relates to how that intrinsic scarcity interacts with demand. Honduras has many very rare stamps that sell for only a few dollars. Great Britain have many relatively common stamps (such as the Penny Black) that sell for a hundred dollars or more. So cost and scarcity are different factors when considering a specialty. Most want scarcity; not everyone wants costly. And third, the degree of specialization needs to be considered. Each philatelic specialty has a tradition o