In the 1970’s and 1980’s the stamp business underwent a shift. The traditional stamp store began not to work very well as a philatelic sales model. At the time dealers thought this was because it didn't make sense to have a store front for which the vast majority of people who passed by had no interest, and rents in central locations had grown very high relative to sales. But looking back, what really ended the traditional stamp store was the rapid rise in stamp prices in the late 1970’s, and the consequent increase in philatelic liquidity. Better stamps became so easy to sell and in such demand that dealers flocked to stamp shows week after week to sell their purchases. Collectors soon followed to where the best selection of goods were offered, and by the time the market cooled in the early 1980’s, there was little desire to go back to the traditional stamp dealer sitting-on-his-wares and waiting-for-customers model that had prevailed in previous decades. There had always been stamp shows, but the boom in this period was the main reason that stamp shows became the preferred trading medium from about 1976 (when the massive International show in Philadelphia showed everyone just what a show could be) until about 2000, when computer penetration made even the older philatelic demographic of philatelists computer savvy enough to start doing most of their stamp business on the internet.
Lewis Shull was a career military officer in the adjutant-general corps of the Army. He retired as a General and had always been a collector and in his retirement became a dealer. Lew soon became a fixture on the stamp show circuit, doing about 40 shows a year. He was a friendly, boisterous man, and he and his wife Helen always had the busiest booth, buying, selling and trading war and stamp stories. Lew had been a cigar smoker, and health issues had made smoking impossible, but he always had a big unlit cigar in his mouth. Lew's main area was United States stamps with a special interest in Ryukyus (he had been stationed in Japan after the war and had bought many of the rarer Okinawa Provisionals as new issues). Lew stopped doing shows about 1990 and passed away a few years later. He was one of the many dealers and collectors that you met in those days because of stamp shows. In today's philatelic economy, Lew would sell stamps on the internet and my relationship with him would be by email and occasionally by telephone. Certainly the internet age has benefited buyers and sellers of stamps; dealers have lower expenses and better sales, and collectors have ease of acquisition, better selection and lower prices because of lower dealer selling costs and greater dealer competition. But even though what we have today is better on so many levels, I miss some of the better aspects of the older ways and wish that it were easier to have more personal contact with other people involved in stamps.
