Monthly Archives: February 2022

Suppose you were a fellow collector of my grandfather Earl Apfelbaum in the 1920s. The probability is that you would be a world wide collector with perhaps a single country concentration. You would have a hardbound Scott album or a McKeels album as Minkus and Harris were still years in the future. You mounted your stamps with hinges and the prevailing philatelic dispute was not over "hinged" versus "never hinged" but over whether the new fangled invention of peelable hinges was worth the additional price (previous to the invention of "peelable glassine hinges", hinges took off most of the gum if you could remove them at all). The Scott catalog was one volume in less than 300 pages and for your $2.95 you got a listing of all the stamps in the world in a hardbound volume. Everyone belonged to a stamp club and the better clubs set up "catalog clubs" where everyone put in a penny or a nickle a month so that the club could purchase a new volume of Scott each year. Philately was far more soc

Chile is one of the two wealthiest countries in Latin America with Uruguay. The country lies along a narrow strip of land along the west coast of the South American continent bordered by the Andes mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Chile's climate ranges from some of the driest hottest deserts to frozen Antarctic landscapes. It's wealth is multidimensional based on mineral wealth including copper, and great agricultural produce including fruits and wines. Philatelically, Chile is fairly simple though the country is an interesting one to collect. The first issues (the imperforate Columbus heads) are very specialized and Scott lists different printings with the same plates as different stamps which is more specialized than most people need. But after that the stamps are pretty straight forward and not very expensive though not easy to find. Chile has long had one of the more conservative stamp issuing policies and even today the Chilean post office issues only about twen