Apfelbaum has always been one of the leaders in stamp auctions. We've offered hundreds of thousands of lots and sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stamps at Public Auction, first by catalog only and now monthly live online. You can see information on our website on how to participate. But we have never forgotten the collector who prefers to buy the stamps he wants when he sees them without the wait and the uncertainty of auctions. Our "Buy It Now" sale will be posted todayhttp://www.stampauctioncentral.com/ba/r142.cfm. Take a look at it. We offer over$1 million worth of fine philatelic material from US reissues to large lots and dealer accumulations all attractively priced.
Philately is not an academic discipline. Thus, there is no set corpus of scholarly works that a philatelist should master in order to be well read in our field. This is fine in the sense that our hobby is just a hobby and as such really doesn't need rules. But it also means that competent philatelists rarely have read and trained from the same books, and often share little of the same intellectual traditions of our hobby. This series of book reviews which I'll try to do weekly, hopes to remedy that. In each article, I'll discuss an important philatelic book, generally one that was one of the books I (and older philatelists of the previous generation) trained on. I'll discuss what's in the book, why it is important today, what aspects of the underlying philatelic assumptions that the book makes have changed, and where you can get the book if you want to read it yourself. The first book is Sloanes column, published in 1961. It will be posted Monday.
There is almost no aspect of political life that doesn't have implications for our hobby. The issue of health care reform has more pertinacity to stamp collecting than most political issues because it bears so directly on the long term financial well being of our country and of all of us. And ultimately any business or hobby can only be as healthy as the general financial health of the population. The headlines today that the health care and Pharma industries have essentially bought into the idea of some kind of health care reform is momentous. Previously, all attempts at government reform of health care has been met with obstruction on the part of the health care industry. It seems a real paradigm shift that the health care providers now see the system as broke and want to help to fix it. Cynics will say that the health industry has seen that reform is inevitable and have decided that the most effective way to get what they want is
The current owners of Apfelbaum are the great grandchildren of Maurice Apfelbaum who first became a stamp dealer in 1910-nearly 100 years ago. We are four- John, Ken, Missy, and Susanne.
John (that's me) is 56. I started collecting stamps when I was eight. The first set of stamps I ever bought was the Jules Verne Monaco set from 1960. I was home sick from school playing with my Harris Statesman Deluxe Album and the Scott catalog. This set caught my fancy and I called my father at work and asked him to bring me home a set (one of the advantages of having a stamp dealer father was the ability to experience an early version of same day delivery). I worked with stamps during summer vacations and when I was at Penn in the 1970's. I joined the firm full time in 1975.
Ken is 53 and has also collected since childhood. He collected Andorra (I think our father wanted to get double duty out of the Minkus
Our company has always been an auction house, holding over 1070 auctions since 1930. About five years ago a number of our customers asked us if we could consider by a direct sales method. These buyers didn't like auctions, the uncertainty as to price or the stress of not knowing whether they would win the lots they wanted. Or if they like auctions, they also wished to see us offer a method of sale where the price was set and obtaining the item was certain. Where there is demand, there is a way. We devised our direct sale which we hold once or twice a month and is hosted on this website and at www.stampauctionnetwork.com . Check it out. Nearly 1500 different lots representing nearly $3/4 million worth of net priced stamps. One click and they are yours. The current sale runs through Monday, but there is almost always one up
The economy seems to have avoided meltdown. The boost was the the bank support package that Bush started and Obama is completing. It has prevented any further financial collapses. Credit and lending are no longer contracting. And the stimulus package has just began to come online. With the trillions of dollars being pumped into the economy, many economists are saying that inflation could be a real problem in the years ahead (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021902578.html). When individuals owe money they can either pay it back or declare bankruptcy. But governments have other options for debt reduction. They can cause inflation. This decreases the value of the debt owed . This happened in the 1970's. Between 1970 and 1980 the value of better collectible postage stamps rose 300%. I'm not making a prediction but the similarities
