Monthly Archives: February 2015

The reason you

Fifty years ago, the vast majority of stamps sold between the same

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

 

Postage Dues are one of what are called special service stamps, that is stamps issued for

During the nineteenth century, several nations maintained post offices in China. This was was part of a general carving up of Chinese sovereignty which went on throughout the nineteenth century. To facilitate those post offices stamps were issued. Italy issued stamps for use in China in 1917, France beginning in 1901 (and ending in 1945, the latest foreign Chinese Office issue), Great Britain in 1917, Germany in 1898, Japan in 1900, Russia in 1899, and the United States in 1922. For the United Sates these issues were largely symbolic. Our merchants sometimes used our post office in China but the main impetus to issuing stamps and maintaining postal facilities was not to be outdone in the imperialist division of China. Our government issued 18 stamps up to the $1 and they were the common perf 11 Washington Franklins that were Overprinted Shanghai which was where our main post office was located. The use of these stamps was limited and they were available mint from the postal agency in Washington.

The problem of what quantities exist of different classic stamps has been one of the great difficulties of philatelic research. Before the days of the Internet nearly all classic stamps that were sold were not illustrated so it was impossible for any census taker to know if he had counted a given specimen before. Counts of stamps such as United States 5c and 10c 1847 tend to be little more than guesses. We know that approximately 3.8 million 5c and 900,000 10c stamps were sold over the postal counters (that is delivered to post offices and not returned as unsold). But how many have survived the ensuing 160 years and still exist in collectors hands? Such numbers are important for anyone pondering stamp prices-whether such prices are higher or lower relative to popularity than they should be. Are there large quantities of US #1s in dealer hands that would preclude prices rising very much were demand to increase? What would happen if these quantities were dumped? Such questions are important

Presidential topical collections in general are not very popular largely because there is so little philatelic material that has been issued for most Presidents (quick- name three stamps that have Garfield or the current Presidential flavor-Coolidge-

The unimaginable has begun to happen. After growing at rates approaching 100% per year the last few years, the market for better People's Republic of China stamps has cooled and prices are down as much as 30% in the last few months. There are several reasons for this. First, the Chinese economy has definitely slowed this year with growth rates half of what they were in years past. In part this is because the Chinese economy is being impacted by the world wide recession which the Chinese have been fortunate enough to avoid up until now. Second, the Chinese property and stock markets have fallen back and much Chinese money that was coming into stamps was speculative money that had been made in the stock and property market. But the most important reason for the fallback in price in PRC stamps is simply that the stamps had gotten too high in value. Speculators always forget that commodities like stamps have no intrinsic value and are only valuable because collectors want them for their collections.

Philately has always been a cold weather hobby. Its popularity nation to nation and region to region has always increased south to north with the highest concentrations of serious collectors where it is the coldest and darkest. The reasons are clear- a cup of hot chocolate, a stamp album and some new additions to mount are a nice way to spend a cold blustery winter's evening. There are other reasons too-paper doesn't keep so well in warm sticky climates and literacy and reading rates which are good predictors of philatelic interest, are higher in northern countries. And we see collector rates getting higher and higher the further from the equator that we move. Philately has always been a major hobby in Scandinavia but even within countries the rate of stamp collecting increases as you move from the warmer parts of the country to the colder. In Germany, probably the most philatelically active nation, far more collectors live in the Northern, colder part of the country than the Southern.

For stamp dealers coming of age in the 1960s the stamp world was replete with Europeans who had escaped from Hitler and Stalin. Most were Jews, though looking back through the less