Monthly Archives: January 2021

A remarkable aspect of philately is that unpopularity breeds further unpopularity. It is truly unusual to see a good collection of nearly any South and Central American country. Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Cuba are exceptions, but for the other twenty or so countries that make up rest of the southern Americas, collections that are even 75% complete for major Scott numbers are quite rare. The reason is financial but not in the way you might think.

 Take Ecuador, for instance. It is a country that is just below average in per capita income but with a large middle and upper middle class and several large cities (philatelic popularity is related to rates of urbanization). There are few real rarities by price among its stamps. Its issuing policy is conservative and appropriate. It should have a decent number of domestic collectors as well as an active expatriate collecting community and yet I can't

Watermarks are a design that are put in paper by the manufacturer to identify the paper as their product. They are an outgrowth of the earliest paper which is called laid paper. Laid paper is produced by allowing the paper pulp particles to coagulate on a bed that is a screen made up of closely knit small parallel rods of metal. The pulp coalesces in a pattern of thickness and thinness that mimics the bed that it was made on. When paper technology advanced and paper was produced on a cloth bed (where the fibers had been woven-thus "wove" paper) paper had no thick-thin variance within the sheet. Paper makers found that they could put a pattern in the cloth bed that the paper was formed on and, when the fibers settled, the pattern would show up in reverse as an area where the paper was thinner. These were the first watermarks.

When stamps were first proposed the major objection to their being issued

Our hobby is just 170 years old, a mere babe by the standards of hobbies such as numismatics. But already the grading standards and the quality grades that collectors desire has undergone a profound metamorphosis, one which current generations of collectors have been spared. For the first collectors, any copy of a stamp from perfect to severely damaged would do and the earliest stamp price lists never mention quality because it didn't matter. One sees an entire genre of philatelic articles beginning about 1870 on soaking and how that is the preferred way of removing stamps from envelopes. This was the quality conscious successor to the earliest removal method of just scraping stamps off envelopes with a knife, which produced the grossly disfigured stamps that later generations just tossed. The "Good, Fair, Poor" paradigm of earliest grading gradually inflated to the "Fine, Very Fine, Extremely Fine" triumvirate that we have today. Perhaps the most significant change in the hobby over the l

One of the earliest objections to Rowland Hill's idea for a gummed label that indicated prepayment of postage was the fear that such a label could be soaked off and reused. A postage stamp is one of the simplest examples of a bearer certificate-anyone who possesses it can use it to mail a letter and the fear of reuse was very real. Postage of a British penny in 1840, when wages of a pound a week would support a family of four with ease, was the equivalent of perhaps $5 today so such fear had a real basis in fact. The first stamps were cancelled with Maltese cross cancellations which provided a sometimes disfiguring obliteration and the town from which the letter was posted placed its date and town stamp that was used in the stampless cover period on the same letter next to the stamp. This procedure was followed in the United States when we began to issue stamps except that the type of cancellation that was used was left to the individual postmasters. That is why throughout the Nineteenth

Mounting stamps in albums has had four major phases in the 170 years that philately has been a hobby.  In the very beginning, collectors were just saving stamps as a whimsical endeavor.There was no science to collecting and the earliest stamp savers would lick the glue on their mint stamps and place them in their albums (This is why today so many of the earliest issue stamps that exist unused don't have any gum). The first generation of collectors never thought that anyone would want their stamps after them and so no effort was made to mount philatelic items in a way that made them tradeable.

The second generation of collectors learned from this and saw that many specimens that they wanted for their collections had been damaged from faulty mounting. This second generation tried to mount their stamps so that they could be removed from their collections and traded or sold. The first mounts of this ty

In 1960 when a young person started stamp collecting the situation played out like this. A parent took you to a stamp shop or the Minkus concession at a Gimbels or other large department store. You looked at several world wide albums and usually settled on a Harris Statesman Deluxe (or maybe a Citation) which had spaces for 30,000 different stamps and cost a bit less than $5. You bought a pair of stamp tongs that were heavy and nearly took two hands to use,  a thousand Dennison stamp hinges and a world wide packet of probably 5000 different stamps. All told you spent ten or twelve bucks-a decent birthday or Christmas present but a bit less than the Pee Wee Reece model baseball glove which competed with it as as gift (for$19.95). It was the packet of 5000 different stamps that made collecting work in those days and it is the packet that is missing in today's lure of philately for newcomers. The H E Harris company (and others) put these packets together from vast quantities of cheaper sta

Stamp Dealers travel quite a bit for business and as a young man I did my share. One evening nearly forty years ago I was visiting some clients in upstate Pennsylvania to purchase their stamps. It was getting late, and as usual I was getting lost. I decided to look for a hotel and the closest one was a tiny inn in the most north east part of the state- The Inn at Starlight Lake. The Inn was a popular summer and weekend vacation spot for New York City people but during the week in the fall it was quite empty. The rooms were tiny and the Inn was built around the concept that you sat around the fireplace in the evening and met the guests and your hosts. There were no guests other than me and soon my hosts knew that I was a stamp dealer and they said that their next door neighbor was an avid collector (which I thought meant plate blocks and First Day Covers).

Soon the neighbor and I were sitting and t