For philatelic Americans traveling in Europe, one of the great pleasures of their trip was a visit to the great Sunday stamp bourses in the major European cities. Collectors would spend their days visiting the retail stamp shops and then on weekends visit the outdoor stamp bourses. These bourses have been written about since Pat Hearst's famous book Nassau Street described his travels around Europe visiting various bourses, wallet packed with dollars. Hearst described country after country where he bought great things, and since the book could easily have been renamed Great Buys I Have Made, you have a good idea already of what he talked about.
I can save you some time and let you and your traveling companion enjoy your Sundays together. I went to the stamp bourse in Madrid last weekend. Philately has never been the hobby in Spain that it is in Germany, but there still has been a considerable amount of philatelic interest in that country. Many of the greatest stamp dealers and collectors from the early eras of philately were Spanish. Dealers like Galvez were Spanish experts and dealers such as Roig sold worldwide stamps extensively, and their signatures today are still a good assurance of the genuiness of material. In the last couple of years, the Spanish philatelic market has been wracked by the Afinsa scandal. Afinsa sold philatelic portfolios and is the latest of a long list of stamp investment schemes that have left thousands of collectors cheated and given philately a bad name. Philatelic investment, almost by definition, can't work on a broad basis. Stamps have no economic value, neither paying rents nor paying interest. Whenever prices rise too fast and collectors are forced from the market, the seeds of a market burst are sown.
To say that the Sunday stamp bourse in Madrid (held in Plaza Mayor) was listless would be an understatement. Twenty or thirty men had tables and had little collections and various bits of stock out. Nearly all of the stamps offered were Spanish, and the prices were nearly twice what an American collector would expect to pay. The few non Spanish stamps were at even higher relative prices. No dealers wanted to buy, a very bad sign in the philatelic market. If Pat Hearst had seen this stamp market, there would have been none of his great books.
Cosmopolitanism, and now the Internet, have destroyed the Sunday European stamp bourse. Why they were so wonderful to Hearst in the pre WWII days was because there had been few Americans traveling to Europe looking for stamps. Large stocks of higher value classic US that had been used on letters to Europe were abundant in European's stocks. Those stocks have been diffused through the nearly eighty years of constant American travel to Europe ( and better European stamps in American hands have often been returned to their home countries in turn). The Internet today has completed the process, so that knowledgeable buyers and sellers today meet online. European Sunday stamp bourses are like American stamp shows, the last refuge of the technologically primitive peddling their tired wares.