Monthly Archives: January 2013
- Posted January 08, 2013Read more »The great stamp speculation of the late 1970s, which saw worldwide stamps at least double in price in less than five years, had a precursor in the mid 1960s. The European stamp speculations that were then the driving force in worldwide price increases had a basis in reality. After World War II, Europe was devastated. The economies of Germany and Italy were shattered, and the economic infrastructure of these countries destroyed. People first needed food, clothing, and shelter; providing this for themselves filled Europe's time in the decade after the War. As the economies of Western Europe improved, collectors began to try to find the post-war issues that they had been unable to afford when they had come out. They looked mainly for the higher values of sets and Airmail denominations for use in the United States. Earlier stamps were also in short supply. Many fine stamp collections had been damaged or destroyed in the War, and in the post war period many fine collections had been sold
- Posted January 07, 2013Read more »Throughout the Nineteenth Century, postal officials around the globe had one paranoia in common: they feared that postal patrons were soaking used stamps off envelopes, washing the cancellations, and then reusing the stamps. Philatelists who have studied thousands of stamps from the period have found scant evidence of this fraud. But that didn't keep postal authorities from devising more and more detailed plans to discourage such illegal reuse. The anti-reuse hysteria reached its apex with the grilled issues of 1867.Grills are tiny cuts made in the paper of a stamp. The stamps were printed, gummed, and, before the perforation process, fed into a device that looks like a printing press but which has metal cutting heads that make a small group of slits in the back of each stamp. The purpose of grills is to allow the canceling ink to penetrate more deeply into the paper, making washing
- Posted January 06, 2013Read more »
Stamps have been written about since they first started being collected (for over 150 years now) so any avid philatelic reader has millions of philatelic words to brighten his cold winter evenings. Over time, readers have realized that stamp writing comes in four major types. Each collector has his favorite type and writers rarely write in more than one of these different philatelic genres.
The first major type of stamp writing, the largest in terms of words written and books and articles published in the more high-brow journals, is technical writing. The first issue of the London Philatelist, published in 1892, had as one of its first articles a long study on the stamps of New South Wales. Articles about plating and stamp use and printing varieties are the staple of scholarly journals and have changed very little over the last century, except for the fact that articles today have a more postal historical edge than they used to. These articles are a bit like the Rolex of - Posted January 04, 2013Read more »Stamp certification never provides absolute certainty to stamp buyers. Expert committees in the United States are very clear that they offer only an opinion, not a guarantee. Their legal boilerplate, which every owner signs when he commits his stamps or covers to the expertization process, stipulates that the opinion is just that, an opinion, and that if the stamp or cover should later prove to be a forgery or repaired, well (and this is couched in a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo), tough luck. Grading standards change as does the equipment available for determining the genuine from the fake. For many years an ultraviolet light was the tool of choice for determining whether or not an early US classic was mint or had a cleaned pen cancel. Later technology with magnification and light has made that way of determining the genuiness of great rarities seem rather quaint. In addition, the ability of stamp doctors to make hinge marks disappear, so that stamps can command the
- Posted January 03, 2013Read more »Most philatelists, and especially most stamp dealers, see a dichotomy between traditional stamp collecting and the collecting of stamps on covers, which has come to be called postal history. Years ago, the best dealers and collectors of covers and postal history came up from the ranks of traditional philately. It was only after someone knew the stamps of a particular area and had collected and studied them for years that they would begin to study the use of those stamps and add covers to their collections. This fundamental way that most collectors began their hobby began to change around 1970 when collectors and dealers started to specialize in covers without any real knowledge of the stamps that franked their covers. This change occurred because increasing philatelic popularity had made prices so high that creating traditional stamp collections was too daunting for many collectors, and they moved into the hobby as cover collectors before having any real grounding in stamps.
- Posted January 02, 2013Read more »Earl P.L. Apfelbaum opened for business full time in 1930 in downtown Philadelphia. He began his business during the Great Depression and started by selling out of his own stamp collection. His business and his stock grew and grew, and by 1950, the Apfelbaum stamp firm had opened a large office on South Penn Square, opposite Philadelphia's city hall in which we had one of the largest retail stamp stores in the United States. There were thousands of books of stamps neatly arranged by country and Scott number in the price range of 25 cents to several hundred dollars per item. There were hundreds of boxes of individually priced covers arranged by country. Clients from around the world would stop in and spend an afternoon or even a few days. Once a German fellow came in while on vacation and was so enamored of the thousands of items that he could peruse that he sent the rest of his family back to Berlin and stayed for over a week.