The Ryukyu Islands are a long archipelago off the main islands of Japan. Settled at an early period, the Ryukyu’s independence from Japan is proven by the linguistic difference between the Japanese and Okinawans. Though written with many of the same characters, Japanese and the several languages of the Ryukyus are very different linguistically (and […]
Apfelbaum was founded as a stamp dealing company over 100 years ago in 1910 and has been owned and operated by my family since Maurice, my great grandfather, started the business. We opened our first stamp shop in 1930 and held our first auction in 1940. When we first began selling stamps, postmen delivered your
One of the pleasures of modern electronic communication is that it costs nothing per word to move. A short sentence costs the same to send as a dense file
The opinion makers in philately held a serious discussion in the 1930s about what direction they hoped the hobby would go. By 1930 there was already a wide enough body of stamps issued for most countries that collectors were already beginning to lose interest in collecting collateral philatelic areas like cut squares, postal stationery, and
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The Washington Bicentennial set is over 80 years old. Issued to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the first President’s birth, the set was issued on January 1, 1932. It has always been a popular set and has more or less been the breaking point between modern and classic US philately. Stamp issues before 1932 include the
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Raymond Weill, who died ten years ago at the age of ninety, was a dealer in the very old time tradition. He and his brother Roger joined their father in their New Orleans stamp business in 1932. Although Weill began as a full range stamp dealer, his business very quickly moved into the higher end
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One of my first professional philatelic tasks, some forty years ago, was to assemble old correspondences for sale. You saw these more in those days than you do today, but what they were were large selections of letters that had been sent between correspondents over a period of years. Usually these were things like weekly
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One of the great stories in cryptology over the last 200 years was working out the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. This was the Egyptian writing of the old dynasties (the ones that had built the pyramids). The writing had fallen out of use and been replaced by different alphabets so that by the beginning of the common
Many collectors who thoroughly enjoy their hobby imagine that their pleasure in their hobby would increase if only they had more stamps. The fantasy grows from one album to a dozen to a full shelf to a stamp room. Recently, we were called in on a case of philatelic gluttony gone wild. The collector was
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