Monthly Archives: May 2021

History is best understood on a continuum. WW II was not an isolated occurrence in world history but was the latest conflagration of centuries of territorial and tribal expansion across Europe. Beginning with the Gothic tribes pressing against the Roman Empire in the Second Century through German unification and the Franco Prussian War and WW I , Europe has always been in conflict. Though the proximate cause of each war is different the overall theme has an historical continuity that allows us not to just understand facts and dates and events, but to understand people.Thus it is with stamps. Stamps have been around for 160 years. Their importance as a technology is not so great now, but in the mid part of the Nineteenth Century proof of the prepayment of postage allowed postal rates to plummet and communication to flourish. This in turn allowed more efficient commerce and improved living standards. Postage stamps were part of a humanity's technological advances that facilitated communication.

Thematic stamp collecting along conceptual lines  has never really caught hold. There was a great gold medal collection making the rounds of the APS Champion of Champion shows well over a decade ago entitled "Murder" where the collector sought to portray how murder was shown on stamps from individual murderers to genocide (such as the Holocaust). But few other thematic collections have tried the "concept" route and today we are mostly stuck with thematics such as Birds on Stamps or Disney which really only use stamps as pictures in a scrapbook to illustrate the collection's thematic point. Famine, however, would be a great "concept" thematic. The collection could trace the history of food with various stamps illustrating different grains and the impact that the discovery of the America's made on food production worldwide and the help that potatoes and corn had in feeding the world. Revenues for taxes on foodstuffs could be included.  The collection could touch on climate and how warming and

In the 1970s Public Auctions were much more frequent (and there were far more philatelic auction companies) and there was no Internet. Auction firms sent out a thousand or so auction catalogs to their best customers and mainly solicited bids by mail. There was no email or fax machines, few phone bids and no live computer bidding  Because of these factors there was spotty coverage at many auctions and many lots really did sell cheaply.

 In 1976, I was in London bumming around a bit after college. I supported myself by doing a bit of stamps, going to auctions. But life then didn't require much support- Europe for an American in those days could be very cheap. I was sitting at a H R Harmer auction in London. Harmer was one of the "venerables"- one of several old line English auction firms that went back to the earliest days of our hobby. Their auctions were stuffy affairs and I was the only person in