Monthly Archives: September 2020

Film and philately share a golden era with personalities larger than life,  from a time that is quite different than our own. Jacques Minkus was such a personality. Minkus's method of selling stamps was to open concessions in major department stores and at its most extensive he had over 35 different shops in many of the largest department stores in the United States including Gimbels in New York. Until about 1960 when retailing trends changed and department stores began to rethink the concept of carrying everything under the sun, more collectors were introduced to our hobby by Minkus stores than any other retail source in the nation.

 Minkus printed his own catalogs and albums and created a sort of alternate universe of philately with novel ways of organizing collections. America had previously been the dominion of Scott but in Minkus world there was no distinctions between the postal purpose of i

When the Penny Black was first issued in 1840, it was part of what collectors have come to accept as a six item set. There was the Penny Black which  prepaid the postage for any letter sent throughout Great Britain under 1/2 ounce. There were four different items of postal stationary called the Mulready envelopes by collectors and listed by Scott as #U1-4. And there was a two penny version of the Penny Black issued in blue which prepaid the postage for up to one ounce anywhere in Great Britain. Penny has gotten all the attention from collectors, but her older brother Twopence deserves a bit of attention too. The 2p is printed in beautiful shades of blue ranging from pale or powder blue to almost a royal blue shade. The color makes the cancels contrast well with design so that two penny blues always look fresh and bright. The Penny Black's color obscures the fineness of the printing and usually make the cancellation seem messy and unattractive. The very opposite is true with the two penny

If the European imperialist designs for Africa that occurred in the late Nineteenth Century are called, because of its frenzied quality, the scramble for Africa, then the colonization of the West Indies that occurred in the early Seventeenth Century could be called the scramble for sugar. Sugar cane and beet are not native to Europe and cheap sources of sugar fueled the colonization of the new world (and with it workers to grow and process the sugar-slaves). Great Britain largely won this first scramble (as they did the one for Africa) and had a score or more of plantation colonies from Antigua to St Vincent. The French took what they could and tiny Denmark, not to be outdone, established its own sugar colony on the island of St Thomas in what came to be called the Danish West Indies. The history of this plantation colony under the Danes was no better or worse than most of the other West Indies colonies-local Carib Indians were killed off by disease and slavery, followed by thousands of