Monthly Archives: April 2017

Stamp theft, despite the scare stories that you sometimes hear, is really not much of a problem. We rarely have a customer inform us that his stamps were stolen and the APS's stamp theft committee almost never sends out an advisory of a stolen collection. In the 1970's stamp theft was more of an issue than it is now and the change from stamps being an actively stolen commodity to an infrequently pilfered one tells us a lot about the changes in our hobby and our world in the last thirty years. 

The reason for the reduction of stamp thefts is threefold. First, stamps have languished in value so that on a "value to difficulty of fencing ratio" they are an inefficient product to steal.  High end TVs, computers and jewelry have made much more appealing targets over the last thirty years and stamps that are stolen are often taken as an afterthought of another robbery. Second, most criminals

Africa is a large continent, inhabited by scores of different ethnicities, speaking hundreds of different languages and dialects. By about 1850, partly through the interference of European powers, partly because of the ebb and flow of history (several large and successful African Empires had broken up between 800 and 1600 AD), and partly because climate and language made large scale political unification difficult, Africa had few indigenous political institutions or the military capabilities that would have allowed it to resist European powers bent on colonization. Early European contacts with Africa had been disastrous for Africans. Rapacious slave traders plied African coasts destroying lives and political power centers. And African tribes were encouraged to fight wars to supply European traders with human POWs for export as slaves. By 1850, the period of extensive capture of new slaves in Africa was largely over (worldwide disgust over the evils of slavery had made international slave

There is no more valuable substance in the world by weight and volume than original gum. Consider—the gum on a thousand mint US Ten Cent 1847's if miraculously removed, commingled and weighed would total about an ounce. And the value of such gum on the stamps is $12,500 for each stamp according to the latest Scott catalog (the difference between an" og" price and a "no gum" price) which makes our magic ounce of og worth a cool $125 million (a US #31 has a $20,000 premium for og making a thousand of them worth $200 million.) And og is increasing rapidly in value. The price of Nineteenth Century stamps with original gum has far outstripped the price of the same stamps without gum over the last twenty years. And this is for a substance that is invisible when you mount your stamps and requires the utmost care so as not to compromise or damage. And that is when you are fortunate enough to have bought og in the first place. I can't tell you how many certificates from

The Lone Wolf was a detective series in the 1920s about a high end burglar named Michael Lanyard who helped the police solve crimes. The series was written by Louis Joseph Vance and was made into about twenty movies in the 1930s. I happened to see one recently on TCM entitled The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date. The plot is a twisted kidnapping, but a key part of the story is that the Lone Wolf—a cool debonair urbane sophisticated lady killer and international jewel thief and crime solver—is a stamp collector. In the first scene, he buys what appears to be a Cuba #244a, an inverted center (though the denomination was difficult to see, and the movie was in black and white) which is represented as the great rarity that the Lone Wolf needs for his very extensive stamp collection (though the invert today catalogs only $650, so philatelic license was taken as to rarity). The collection is then stolen from the Lone Wolf who must solve the kidnapping