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Most philatelists, and especially most stamp dealers, see a dichotomy between traditional stamp collecting and the collecting of stamps on covers, which has come to be called postal history. Years ago, the best dealers and collectors of covers and postal history came up from the ranks of traditional philately. It was only after someone knew […]

Earl P.L. Apfelbaum opened for business full time in 1930 in downtown Philadelphia. He began his business during the Great Depression and started by selling out of his own stamp collection. His business and his stock grew and grew, and by 1950, the Apfelbaum stamp firm had opened a large office on South Penn Square, opposite Philadelphia’s

Throughout philatelic history, writers have been predicting the next great philatelic area or specialty that will take off in price. Predictions are usually founded on one of two criteria that predict the supposed increase in  popularity that the stamps will undergo. Either the economy of the country will take off creating a pool of desperate

The stamp business used to have what economists call high barriers to entry. It took a lot of knowledge, a lot of capital, and years of advertising and satisfying customers to build a good mailing list and a good stamp business. When the Internet became the preferred method of buying and selling in philately, there

Philately has always been a cold weather hobby. Its popularity nation to nation and region to region has always increased south to north with the highest concentrations of serious collectors where it is the coldest and darkest. The reasons are clear: a cup of hot chocolate, a stamp album, and some new additions to mount

In the 1940s and 1950s, the terror of the philatelic world was Elliot Perry. Perry was a knowledgeable philatelist but a personal horror. Every philatelic dispute was to him a holy crusade. A suggestion that his opinion wasn’t formed on Olympus enraged him to the point that he never forgave the miscreant who doubted him.

The desire to collect is innate and probably relates to the gatherer instinct that separates humans from other primates. But in a world in which one can collect everything from antique barbed wire to Victorian pocketbooks, why do people collect stamps? The answer, I think, comes down to three factors: community, size, and orderliness. First,

Determining the existing quantities of different classic stamps has been one of the great difficulties of philatelic research. Before the days of the Internet, nearly all classic stamps that were sold were not illustrated so it was impossible for a census taker to know if he had counted a given specimen before. Counts of stamps

For many years, few stamp collections required many steps be taken for their security. Few collections were valuable enough for the average burglar to bother with, and even if damaged by fire, the low value of stamps in general meant that they were easy to replace. But the rise in philatelic values in the last