Monthly Archives: February 2017

Most special stamps relate to postal use and postal purposes. Stamps such as Airmails are higher denominated stamps and the extra revenue is used to defray the cost of the class of service that is being used. But War Tax stamps are a different animal entirely-they are a country using its postal service to generate revenue for another purpose, in this case war funding. The first War Tax stamps were issued by Spain in the late Nineteenth Century and War Tax stamps have been issued as late as 1974 in Bahrain. But by far the most significant use of War tax stamps was in the British Commonwealth for raising revenue for WW I. Most of the Colonial issues are overprints, but Canada produced different stamps for War Tax one of which is illustrated here. They way War Tax stamps produced revenue was that after a certain date all letters had to bear a tax stamp in addition to the postage stamp and all revenue from the sale of the tax stamps went to the war effort. The United States had

We tend to think of Philately as one hobby when it is really three separate and distinct endeavors, each with its own goals, problems, future and marketplace. The three are Mainstream Philately, High-end Philately and Aspirational Philately. Mainstream Philately is what most of us engage in from the youngster enjoying his first packet to the collector perusing Ebay for the best price and quality for the items he wants to add to his collection. Mainstream Philately is determined largely by the market-the stamps that mainstream philatelists desire are for the most part readily available, with most of the search and negotiations going on over price and quality rather than over whether the item is going to be offered at all. Most of the stamps that most collectors want fall into this category.

High-end Philately is quite different. Here, most of the items are not only price rarities,

There is an unfortunate hobby arc that goes like this. A wealthy person decides that he wishes to be an enthusiast, buys an enormous amount of gear, and loses interest before he has gotten any of the real enjoyment out of his new whim. This is the fly fisher who has all the latest Orvis gear or the guy with the 120" projector screen in a private home. In philately, this shows itself in the new collector who buys a large set of very beautiful and expensive matched hingeless specialty albums, fills them with thousands of the mostly more basic stamps and loses interest in our hobby before all the real fun begins. For the great pleasure of philately is the chase, searching for difficult to find material and slowly creating a fine collection from which you learn and derive joy. But these ephemeral collectors provide a benefit for other collectors in the sense that plankton provides a benefit for whales. They create a constant stream of fine, barely used specialty album collections

In the 1950s and 1960s our company had an Estate Planning department. Estate Planning (it is so far in the distant philatelic past that it needs explanation) was advice to philatelists on what to do with their collections after they died, especially with regards to estate tax appraisals. This was needed because the level at which estates became taxable was much lower in 1970 than it is today (It was $600,000 vs $5 million now) and because many fewer people engaged in tax planning with regards to their non philatelic assets so that even at the lower tax threshold rate of the 1960s many estates were taxable that wouldn't be today given the sophisticated estate planning that many wealthy people  use.

Russian stamps of the 1930's have always fascinated me. They are beautiful and well designed with friendly, internationalist themes and yet they were issued by a vicious regime that was systematically exploiting its citizens and was highly militaristic in orientation. Another aggressive state of this period, Germany, at least was more honest about its goals and had a highly nationalistic stamp issuing policy. In the exaltation of the Volk and the Fatherland its easy to see the factors that led to WWII. But as George Orwell explained so well in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the pathological hypocrisy of the Soviet communist system was without equal in history. Even as he was condemning millions of his own citizens to the Gulag or starvation, Stalin's stamps show kitschy representations of pacifism and coexistence. My favorite set is Russia #546-550. Here the horrors of war are illustrated in art deco style, almost a cartoonish depiction of the grimness of war. Russia certainly had enough experience

    Civilization requires communication. As societies have developed, communication has developed with it, both for personal use and for commerce. Throughout the early stamp issuing period many different ways have been tried to speed mail delivery (and remember before electronic communication, the only way to communicate at a distance was by the post). Postal agencies tried airmail. They tried balloons and railroads and trolley cars and even the Pony Express. Speed of communication was always at a premium especially in business where the value of timely information could be immense.

While Francois Fournier was a philatelic facsimile maker whose work fools only novices or collectors who have never seen the real thing, Jean de Sperati spent his life creating forgeries designed to undermine the most knowledgeable philatelists. Even his book "Philatelie sans Experts" (Philately without Experts) shows his prime motivation was the thrill of creating forgeries that even great experts couldn't tell apart. And Sperati's work is good, so good, in fact that until about 1920, when it became known that he was doing forgeries, stamps that he made in his workshop would routinely get certificates as genuine from the most prestigious certifying boards. Sperati's work was a passion. He engraved his stamps from scratch - a process that took months. He bought sheets of genuine stamps so that he could use the selvage for printing his forgeries so that the paper and watermark would be the same as the original. Indeed, one wonders that he bothered at all as the financia

The best model in the twentieth century for an evolved peace has been Ireland and Great Britain. After centuries of British occupation, the Irish finally obtained independence in 1922 through armed struggle and political effort. Early relations between the Irish Republic and the balance of Great Britain were difficult and even in the last decades of the 20th century terrorist violence over Northern Ireland (part of the island of Ireland that the British retained control over) has continued. Peace has finally broken out though, and it is attributed, more than anything else, to rising living standards in the Irish Republic. Politicians on both side of the Irish Sea realized that better opportunities for young people deprive terrorists and political extremists of their raw material-martyrs. It is a crazy person indeed that prefers strapping a bomb to himself to the prospect of a good job where he can get ahead and find a wife and have a family. When politicians provide those prospects to young

Russian stamps of the 1930's have always fascinated me. They are beautiful and well designed with friendly, internationalist themes and yet they were issued by a vicious regime that was systematically exploiting its citizens and was highly militaristic in orientation. Another aggressive state of this period, Germany, at least was more honest about its goals and had a highly nationalistic stamp issuing policy. In the exaltation of the Volk and the Fatherland its easy to see the factors that led to WWII. But as George Orwell explained so well in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the pathological hypocrisy of the Soviet communist system was without equal in history. Even as he was condemning millions of his own citizens to the Gulag or starvation, Stalin's stamps show kitschy representations of pacifism and coexistence. My favorite set is Russia #546-550. Here the horrors of war are illustrated in art deco style, almost a cartoonish depiction of the grimness of war. Russia certainly had enough experience

Aerophilately has been a popular philatelic specialty for nearly a hundred years now. No country has as many interesting Airmails as does France, and indeed the Airmails of France cover many of the more esoteric aspects of our hobby. The first two Airmails are overprints and show that aspect of stamp issuance; an earlier issue receives an additional print that changes its purpose and often the postage that it was originally sold for. The second issue of the Airmails of France are the famed Ile de France Airmails. These Airmails are provisionals issued for just one flight and not available through the general philatelic agency. Like many of the rarest early worldwide Airmails, they have a quasi-official character, and, had they not been placed in prominent collections at the early period that they were, they probably would not today enjoy major catalog number status.

The three great scourges of humanity have historically been war, famine, and pestilence. Modern technology though seems to have solved the problems of the devastation of two of these. In the last two centuries over 100 million peo