The Coil issues of the Washington-Franklin period Flat Press printings represent one of the greatest problems in all of philately. Few other areas have so many difficult to detect forgeries. The problem is this: The Washington-Franklins were first issued three ways-as perf 12 singles, as imperforates and as Coils, perf 12. The imperfs and the fully perforated stamps to the 5c value are fairly inexpensive. The Coils are rare. Beginning about 1920, unscrupulous stamps dealers began to cut the perfs off of perforated stamps to make forgeries of coils. These were unconvincing as the margins on the imperforated sides are invariably too small. In the latter 1920's someone had a series of perforating devices made by a tool and die maker with the appropriate sized perfs. These machines were used on imperfs to forge coils. Thousands were made and today faked coils from this period outnumber the genuine by at least ten to one (once we get to the Rotary press period, from
Recently I went to see a collection of a life long customer of my father and my grandfather. Harry had died in 2005 but before that there was rarely an auction of ours that he hadn't attended buying many different countries, but concentrating mainly on United States, Canada and Israel. Our records, which go back over twenty years, show that in the ten years before he died he had spent over $30,000 in our auctions and he had been at least as big a buyer since the 1940's as he had been in recent years. It was with great expectations that I arrived at his wife's house when she called. The beginning was not auspicious. "I didn't wait long after Harry died", said Mrs Harry "to move his stamps. Boxed them up in cartons and moved them down the basement. Nice to have the room. Didn't want his mess around."
Down the basement we went and lined on the floor, stacked four high were 60 large book cartons. The basement was damp. I was scared. The first carton I opened was from
The stamps of Israel are among the most popular of any country in the world. Israel is a major economic player, with a high per capita income and large foreign currency earnings which gives its citizens money to spend on hobbies. Further, Israel has a very well educated population, another predictor of philatelic popularity. And lastly, Israel is a country with a religious affiliation, the homeland of the Jews, and as such its stamps are popular with Jews of the Diaspora, living around the world. And increasingly, with the Jewish homeland being tied up in fundamentalist Christian eschatology, Israeli stamps have found new collectors
One of the major underpinnings of modern economic and political understanding is a broad paradigm of human behavior called rational choice theory. Different economists and social scientists apply it differently, but it essentially means that left to their own devices people will make decisions that maximize their spending power when they are buying and try to maximize their happiness when they are making other social decisions. Rational choice theory is so much of a core assumption of most social science that it is rarely addressed. And yet people so often make choices that seem to optimize their unhappiness and waste their money that one would think that the theory itself would get more critical evaluation. Take our hobby for example. How many people pick a specialty with any degree of forethought as to their greatest happiness? And mounting and storage? Every dealer has unending stories of collectors who kept stamps in such bad conditions as to ruin most of their value and thus their
Philatelic colors often have a nomenclature that is unique to the philatelic field and often the term for shades varies from philatelic specialty to philatelic specialty depending on the whim (and translations from the early foreign catalogs) of the early Scott compilers. The color terms are usually consistent within each country-the dull red of the US #11 is consistent with the dull red of the Bank Note issues- but there is little match up of color terminology between countries. And some of the color terms don't equate with what most people think of when they think of that color. The Pink of US Scott #64, for instance, in no way resembles the pink clothing that any of our wives have in their closets. And some of the color terms are just baffling. What is a Pigeon Blood Pink (US #64a) or the umber brown of the later Nineteenth Century issue of Newfoundland? The inexactness of color names even extends to areas where there is perfect scientific agreement on what the color looks
