Monthly Archives: July 2016

The high point of stamp journalism was in the 1930's. Scores of weekly and monthly philatelic periodicals existed, many of them only a few pages and many of the journals existing for only a few issues. The Great Depression put many people out of work and printing companies had tremendous excess capacity, so there were many people with time to write and publish and printing costs were cheap. WW II put many of the less significant publications out of business as rationing made printing more difficult and the war meant full employment here at home.

Turkey today is a country with only moderate influence in areas that most often make headlines in American newspapers. But until World War I Turkey was often an important player in the European theater. Turkey, through Byzantium, later named Constantinople, was at the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, and though Rome itself was sacked in the fifth century and the western Roman Empire formally ended at that time, the empire in the east continued until the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. The Ottomans continued to dominate the politics of Eastern and Southern Europe and nowhere was this more evident than in the Balkan area. The Balkans are a mountainous area in southeastern Europe that have been at the fulcrum of much European turmoil. Because of its geographic location the Balkans have been the path from Asia to Europe and so have been a buffer for both Turks and Europeans wishing to secure their borders. Montenegro is a small and mountainous country along the

For over 75 years the United States has issued stamps for Duck Hunting. To go hunting, each year a hunter must purchase a (now $25) Federal Duck hunting stamp and usually a state duck hunting stamp as well. The proceeds from the sale of the stamps are a user tax, going back to wetlands and duck management programs. The Federal Duck Stamp program is one of the oldest user fees that the government has imposed. Duck stamps have long been very popular

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 opaque lens of our time, I know several were political escapees and at least one was fortunate enough to get out or he would have worn a pink star before he was exterminated. In 1965, the average philatelic refugee was about fifty, so in the prime of his professional life. And there were scores of them on the American philatelic scene.

The growth of Asian philately has undermined traditional thinking about where new collectors come from. The traditional model has been the evolutionary model - children (usually boys) introduced to the hobby and collecting in their youth become re enamored with stamps in middle to old age. This paradigm has described the traditional collecting arc in the United States and Europe and has caused considerable chagrin among philatelists about the future of our hobby when we see so few young collectors. The Asian model is quite different - few Chinese collected as children. Rather, as young adults and middle aged men they have come into the hobby in droves. The reasons for this might provide us with a way to promote philately to more mature people today.

Let's suppose most people had too much money and needed so badly to lose some of it that they offered courses in how to lose it. I can't speak of what they would teach when the course concerned non philatelic areas, but when the subject came to stamp collecting there is no doubt that the best way to lose money is to buy new issues. It's a method that is tried constantly by thousands of collectors and proves itself a winner (that is loser) every time.

Take a country-say the United States- and buy every stamp as a new is