Monthly Archives: June 2019

One hundred and fifty years is only a tiny time frame in the history of mankind and yet it is only within the last 150 years that the ownership of human beings has been outlawed in the United States. And rather than repugnance over the moral outrage of slavery being the cause of its abolition, it took a Civil War and the deaths of nearly 600,000 Americans to end it (this was in a nation with a population of a little over 30 million-mortality at this rate would have produced over six million American casualties if the war was fought today). In the civilized English speaking world (with the exception of the United States) slavery was outlawed before stamps were issued. One of the most interesting stamps issued on this subject is the Jamaica Abolition of Slavery issue of 1921.

 Slavery, like the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide still has its deniers. They typically work to ensure that slavery

The collecting impulse relates to retentiveness and the desire to hold onto things and order them rather than throw them away. Like a genetic disposition towards height, this shows up both as an individual predilection and as a general trait in homogeneous populations. I'd like to make a bold natural selection interpretation (remember I have just been to the Galapagos Islands) of why some cultures have larger stamp collecting instincts than others. Across the world, philately seems to have a direct relationship to latitude. The closer to the poles, the more likely a culture is to have embraced philately. This has often been explained as a factor of economics as Northern European countries have traditionally been among the world's wealthiest. But many national groups closer to the equator have enjoyed economic success in the last fifty years and they don't seem to be embracing collecting hobbies. I think colder climates, with their long winters, have produced a psychological instinct to

Electronic communication has little variable cost. Once the lines are laid, or the satellite launched, electrons fly for free. Not so postal communications where distance travelled matters. Sending a letter from Philadelphia to one of its suburbs costs far less than mail from Philly to Nome, Alaska. World wide postal services began eliminating distance surcharges in 1840 with Rowland Hill's revolution in cheap postage. Before that, letter charges were based on how far the envelope had to go. In the United States, the distance price increased at over 300 miles in the early period and the reason that the United States issued two postage stamps simultaneously-the 5c and 10c 1847- was to pay the distance surcharge.

The reason behind the elimination of distance pricing was that the efficiencies of accounting, rating and collecting the different rates and the increased use of postal service would make

Few people today understand the technical revolution that the invention of the postage stamp produced. In many ways, stamp invention had as great an effect on 19th Century communication and commerce as computers and electronic communication has had on ours. Ease of contact facilitated business and social interaction. Business was enhanced. Newspapers and book readership increased as it became cheaper to deliver texts to readers. Social barriers fell as the lower classes could communicate with relatives and have access to employment and commercial opportunities that had been denied them. And the inventor of the postage stamp was fully aware of the social benefits of his ingenuity. Rowland Hill was a passionate progressive who fought for the betterment of the middle classes throughout his life. Opposed to slavery (and remember a prominent part of the Conservative agenda in the pre-1860 period was the rights of private property which included the right to own other human beings) and dedicated

Howard Ryan was an old collector when I first entered the stamp business forty years ago. He collected line engraved stamps of the nineteenth century which meant the first issues of Great Britain, all of United States and a few issues of a few European and foreign countries. Line engraving was the most secure form of printing and engraved stamps were very difficult and expensive to forge. Countries used them to discourage counterfeiting and to a large extent it worked. There are no decent counterfeits of nineteenth century US stamps and hundreds of forgeries of nineteenth century German States stamps, most of which were printed by typography, a simpler and far less secure printing method. Howard only collected line engraved and he only collected them in the highest gem like quality. So he was after a 120 year old paper product that had been cut from a sheet, placed on an envelope, delivered hundreds if not thousands of miles distant, removed from the envelope and placed in a succession

Philately differs country to country in the degree of specialization with which it is pursued. For many Latin American countries a specialist will want only the classic stamp, perhaps a few multiples, and a cover or two. Mexico has the district overprints which offer a delight of minutiae but among Latin American philately this is rare. For old world collectors, probably no country is more specialized than Austria. Austrian collectors use the Ferchanbauer and Mueller catalogs and for the classic issues collect their stamps by mint and used, multiples, color varieties, usages, first day cancels and early usages and paper thickness (measured in millimeters) and more. The far greater specialization and attention to detail is prevalent in all the German speaking countries and in Scandinavia and is in marked difference to the philately of the rest of the world. It's not that differences in paper thickness don't exist on classic US or GB stamps, it's that the collectors don't care much. This

Collectors usually want three things in a philatelic specialty-aesthetic appeal, acquisition challenge and affordability. Each collector defines these terms differently. But we all want the stamps that we collect to be intrinsically attractive. We want our ability to obtain them to equal our interest in the philatelic hunt and we want the cost of the collecting to match our financial ability to afford the stamps. On these criteria there are few more interesting major countries to collect than the Netherlands. The Dutch have always been among the world's most commercial nations and postal use throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has produced a large supply of material. The stamps are cleanly designed and well printed. And the country has had stable government and low inflation which kept postal rates the same for long periods of time, resulting in relatively few postal issues until about 1960. And Netherlands has the unusual characteristic (if collected by the Scott catalog)

When an organization is facing large deficits like the USPS is facing now, the temptation is to look at bold changes. Finding several billion dollars to balance the budget is never easy, but managers are often tempted to forget that a large forest is made up of many trees and that many small changes can have have a big impact on the bottom line. One idea for increasing postal revenues in a profitable area would be to increase the number of collectors buying new issue stamps to put away. Stamps that are bought and put in collections are almost pure profit for the USPS and it's hard to understand why they don't make more of an effort to increase stamp collecting. And what would increase collecting more than anything else would be some kind