Monthly Archives: December 2019

Collecting airmail stamps was a far more popular specialty half a century ago than it is today. Airmail was a major technological advance in communications. Before 1920 the quickest any paper communication could get from one place to another was approximately five hundred miles a day providing expensive railroad lines had been laid. Railroads were ubiquitous in the United States and Great Britain but in many less commercial countries (say Mexico or Italy) communication between far flung areas was slow. Planes and small runways were far cheaper than railroads and Italy among other countries made a concerted effort to promote early airmail flights. By 1940 Italy had issued 105 airmail stamps compared to 24 for the United States, and none for Great Britain. As a specialty, Italian airmail stamps have a special status all their own. Collectors collect early flights and Zeppelins and the stamps mint and used. The airmails of Italy have an almost unique status in the philatelic world as nearly

There are an increasing number of philatelocracies-countries that exist largely to issue stamps and whose independent political status is made possible by the revenues generated by the sale of philatelic items. There are scores of philatelocracies now-places like the Grenadines of St Vincent or Guernsey- places which exist because of sales of stamps to collectors. Today, they are largely smaller islands or political subdivisions of larger nations. In the late Nineteenth Century, philatelocracies were even more common. Many of the French and Portuguese African issues of the 1890-1915 period which comprise thousands of issues from scores of fragmented geopolitical units existed largely to sell stamps to collectors. The original philatelocracy was San Marino. Nestled in the Apennines, San Marino the oldest nation state in the world tracing its independent origins to the fourth century. It is 25 square miles and has a population of about 30,000 and up to 1960 had issued over 2000 different

Attempts to help balance postal budgets produced many advertising ideas over the years since the first postage stamps were issued. The Great Britain Mulready envelope which was issued coincidentally with the Penny Black in 1840 was the first to bear advertising. In this case it was privately done but the advertisers sold the envelopes to users for less than face value to encourage their use. New Zealand experimented with what are called backprint advertising which was printed on the backs of some late nineteenth century stamps and then sold by the advertisers below face value to encourage use. But government sponsored advertising began first in Europe in the early part of the Nineteenth Century. Many countries, including France, Germany and Denmark sold advertisements in the labels of the booklets and booklet panes that were produced at the time. Italy did one better, placing ads on labels that were an intrinsic part of the stamp and were meant to be used on the letter as part of the postage

The first basic question that new stamp collectors face is whether they should collect mint stamps or used stamps. Generally, this decision is made in the very first phases of collecting. It is usually a decision that is made more on impulse than on careful evaluation of the pros and cons of each type of collecting and too often it is immutable with the collector sticking to his choice of mint or used to the end of his philatelic days. The question of whether it is more rewarding to collect mint stamps or used stamps is not a question of logic or argument but one of temperament and taste. European collectors have long had more appreciation of nice used stamps, feeling that they were more collectible because they have served their postal duty. Mint stamps have been more popular with United States and Asian collectors who came to the game later and with less appreciation of the historical nuances of our hobby.
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Alessandro Manzoni was a great Italian writer whose writing contributed to Italian cultural nationalism in the Nineteenth Century and led to the unification of Italy. When he died in 1873 Giuseppe Verdi wrote his famous requiem in his honor. Manzoni's most famous novel is The Betrothed, a long and involved story that is to Italy and the Italians what Hugo's Les Miserables is to the French and Tolstoy's War and Peace is to the Russians. These are works that encapsulate the national story of their respective nations (often in allegorical ways) and the characters are national "types"( The United States doesn't have a book like this and those of us who went to school in the sixties and seventies remember that English class was largely a search for The Great American Novel). One of the most famous Italian sets is the Manzoni commemorative of 1923 which was issued in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Manzoni's death. The set was issued by Italy proper and was also overprinted for several