Before confederation in 1870, Italy was made up of many independent states. Among the most prominent of these was the state of Tuscany which is the state where the city of Florence is located. Many of the world’s greatest rarities come from Tuscany, but a collector can obtain many of these stamps at a very modest price. These scans are from a $160,000 collection of Tuscany which we have broken down and which we have for sale on our website.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, large stamp auctions were held much more often than they are today. Stamp dealers could count on a two thousand lot Harmer's sale every month along with a good half dozen other decent monthly stamp auctions. And that was only in New York City. Well capitalized dealers would often buy big box and carton lots, often at very favorable prices because there was so much on offer. Often they could work out only a portion of the lot to get out their cost plus a small profit and have no time to do more before the next auction took place. So all the unlooked at material would get boxed back up and shuffled off to the back room. Over and over this happened, and this is what accounted for the wonderful "back rooms" of old time dealers (that and the "aging effect"—collections that have been put away for forty years have stamps that you just don't see today). Dealers of two generations ago had been able to purchase great large auction lots with lots of better values,
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Pope Francis’s visit to the United States has drawn attention to Popes and papal history. Francis himself has been pictured on many stamps
Philately is a hobby where you can turn off the modern world. And the collector who made the collection we are offering intact did just that. He collected by this edition of the 1897 Scott catalog.
WONDERFUL NINETEENTH CENTURY COLLECTION of well over ten thousand different stamps in a pristine 1930 edition of the Scott brown hardbound International album. The collection has strength in all phases, especially British Commonwealth, French Colonies, German Area, and much more. The collector assembled this collection over a period of three decades, and it was a labor of love. Virtually every stamp painstakingly selected and in VERY FINE quality with the emphasis on better $25-250 stamps and missing
Millions of stamp collectors worldwide maintain new issue subscription services. Postal agencies avidly promote such subscriptions, where a collector signs up, lists his credit card, and then receives all of the new issues of the agency as they are issued. The price is usually face value plus a service fee and often, for foreign stamps, a shipping charge. The advantage of buying stamps this way is that you never miss a new issue; the disadvantage is that you almost immediately see a 50-75% reduction in the value of your stamps. This is because almost no one ever uses newer issues, at least not in the quantity that they are bought. When these newer issues are traded, they sell usually for half the postage value or less. So a wise collector would endure a little inconvenience and purchase newer issues a few years after they come out and save a great deal of money.
Stamp separation isn’t something that most people, even philatelists, think much about anymore. But in its day it was a hot topic, combining technological concerns with ease of use and cost of production. The first stamps had no easy way to separate them. They were printed and not perforated, and scissors were needed to cut them apart. Rowland Hill, the inventor of the postage stamp, had no interest in stamp separation in his first design. The reason is that no one, Hill included, had any idea what a revolution in communication and postal use stamps would cause. This revolution was the result of the reduction of postal rates that prepaid postage allowed. Before stamps, postmen had to stop at each address to collect the money for letters delivered there. This was time consuming, inefficient, and rife with irregularities. Certainly, Hill and the early postal reformers hoped that postage stamps would be successful, but they had no idea that within a few years, tens of millions of stamps
Countries have been issuing postage stamps for over 175 years. The classic period of stamp issues are from 1840-1900. And the modern period is from 1960 until now. The Golden Age of philately encompasses the issues from 1900-1960. These are, for most countries, the most popular issues and usually the most interesting as well.
By 1900, philately was already a well established hobby with tens of thousands of collectors worldwide. Postal agencies saw stamp collectors as a revenue source and began competing for their collecting dollar by issuing attractive limited issue sets to tempt collectors into buying them for their collection. Most of the
Whales are near the top of everyone’s list of favorite animals. They’re beautiful and graceful, don’t bother humans, and, if they needed anything to enhance their appeal, they’re endangered. Smart and savvy, whales had been at the top of their food 
chain until about 1800 when humans developed the technology to keep sailing ships at sea for months at a time, and whaling began. (Whaling is a euphemism for the deliberate killing of whales for the oil that comes from the blubber of whales. Whale meat is eaten in scattered areas, but most humans don’t like the taste of any marine mammals, whales included). The real whaling industry today is related to
There are two main ways to collect stamps—by country or by theme. Until about 1960, collectors nearly always collected by country. The reason was simple: In the era before widespread commemoratives, there were few themes that had enough philatelic material to make collecting them enjoyable. Early popular thematics were Scouting, Red Cross, children’s welfare, and sports. As worldwide stamp issues have morphed from tens of thousands of varieties to millions of varieties, the opportunities for thematic collecting have expanded.
But with more stamp issues have come problems for thematic collectors. Stamps depicting animals or butterflies or children
Many of the things that make philately the world’s best hobby—attractiveness of the stamps themselves, international markets, very high values for easily transferrable pieces of paper—have made stamps one of the preeminent bribery tools of the twenty-first century. Because bribery of government and business officials is not all that pervasive in the United States (though still, unfortunately, too common), we tend to overlook the amount of bribery around the world and its impact on stamp prices. In the US, very few people would try to bribe a judge or an IRS agent or customs official. In many countries, such bureaucrats look at bribery income as part of their pay.
Take the People’s Republic of China for instance. In the PRC, if you want to add a room to your home, the permits are cheap, but the bribe to the government
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The belligerents during WWII spent enormous effort trying to influence the morale
The first stamp in the world was issued by Great Britain in 1840, and ever since British Area philately has been the most popular specialty worldwide. By 1900, over 300 entities owed allegiance to the British Crown and had issued postage stamps. Some, such as Canada, were significant major first world countries. Others, such as Tasmania, New South Wales, or Jammu and Kashmir were component states of larger countries such as Australia and India which hadn’t confederated yet. Still others were smaller colonies that had British government such as Antigua and Seychelles. And lastly, there were the numerous colonies that represented political statements by the British foreign office—places like Zululand—which retained local government with a light British political overlay as the London government attempted to improve its political
To be an attractive specialty, a country should have many different things. The stamp issues should be well designed and have a strict postal purpose and not be designed for collectors. The Goldilocks’ theory should be in play: there should not be too many stamps issued, and there should not be too few stamps issued—rather, it should be just right. The stamps have to lend themselves to specialization by issue, and there have to be detailed catalogs to let collectors know what is available and what is needed. And the stamps have to be affordable.
Probably the country that meets all of these criteria best is Denmark. There is only one stamp that sells for more than a thousand dollars and few that are more than a hundred. The whole country can be had for well under $5,000, which for a collecting specialty that could last a lifetime
Before the late 1970s (and the advent of Federal Express and overnight delivery), the only way to move documents from one place to another was by post. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the post was not only the fastest way to move documents; it was the only way. Ordinary postal delivery was fast. By 1900, mail from Toronto to Ottawa or Montreal was usually accomplished overnight. But businesses required even faster communications, and the Canadian Post Office (and other postal agencies worldwide) usually provided it.
Special Delivery is a service where mail is expedited. In Canada, delivery from east to west coast was only two or three
WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF OVER 20,000 DIFFERENT TO 1940 IN A PRISTINE PAIR OF GIBBONS NEW IMPERIAL ALBUMS
This wonderful completely intact collection was put together over decades and is in a pair of the best albums for British Commonwealth. The collection has strength in all phases from British Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America with good to very good sections of every country. The two volume collection has a thousand pages and most are as well filled as the ones we scanned (picked to give you a flavor of the collection). We carefully went through the collection for genuineness and quality. We crossed off in light pencil all of the questionable and non-genuine stamps which amounted to a dozen or two items.
It’s hard to explain to those too young to remember the excitement of the space program of the 1960s. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 as the first man made orbiting satellite, there was a minor panic which soon developed into a space race. The rush to put people into space and onto the moon became tied up in national pride. But in a very real sense, the ten year mission that was an original part of the Kennedy presidency to put a man on the moon by 1970 was a wonderfully invigorating national goal.
Technology in the 1960s was primitive by today’s standards. There is a wonderful scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the space capsule going to the moon needs to be rerouted, and the engineers at the space center took out their slide rules (a slide rule is a calculating device that, like the abacus, has largely been relegated
