Monthly Archives: November 2021

Peter Holcombe has passed away nearly a decade ago. Peter was one of the dwindling few of world wide dealer/experts that used to be prominent in the hobby. Peter was born in England and lived the last thirty years of his life in Switzerland. For most of his life he was an active dealer but for the last few years he was more of an expertiser. He tended towards the most esoteric regions of our hobby from Greece and Greek area to Chinese overprints and Thailand. He was especially good with British Commonwealth stamps. He issued certificates and signed stamps and was one of the more active expertisers in the world until he slowed down some ten years ago. Experts like Holcombe, not committees, used to be the norm in world wide philately. The Americans and the British have gravitated away from individual experts to where the Royal, British Philatelic Association, Philatelic Foundation, American Philatelic Expertisation service, PSE are all "committee expertisers" where stamps are supposedly pa

Every country has peculiarities of its specialization. The Germans have coil numbers printed on the back of stamps and collect their coils in strips of eleven to prove that the stamps didn't come from a sheet which was printed with rows no larger than ten. The French collect gutter pairs with plate numbers, called millisimes. The Swedes measure the perfect centeredness of their socked-on-the-nose cancels. But no country collects their revenue stamps like the United States. No country includes such a broad array of revenues in the specialty catalogs as are listed in the Scott US Specialized catalog. No country lists Privately issued revenues such as the US Match and Medicines. And finally, no country has so many or so avidly collected Duck Stamps. The Hunting Permits, or Ducks, as they are called  are issued each year and have been since 1935 to pay the Federal tax on Duck Hunting. They are probably the greatest crossover philatelic item. More non stamp collectors collect Duck stamps (as p