We are offering a collection described as follows:

 

COLONIAL PHILATELY

Most really comprehensive, worldwide collections are very strong in traditional philatelic areas, and this wonderful collection of many tens of thousands of stamps, housed in 11 clean and neat Master Global albums, is no exception. Germany, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Latin America are all very well represented with thousands of better stamps and hundreds of hundred dollar and above stamps.

 

Where this collection differs from the normal excellent, high quality, well filled, worldwide collection was that the collector (a historian, now deceased) was a student of historical time periods. He saw that the great shedding of Colonies by Great Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal in the post WWII period was an event of as much historical significance as the very creating of the Colonial period itself (he felt that the period 1550-1950 would be accorded its own place in history as "the Colonial Period" much as eras such as the “Hellenic period" and the "Middle Ages" are studied as distinct eras by scholars). Accordingly, as this was happening in 1950, he began to concentrate (in addition to his tens of thousands of pre-1940 stamps that are in the collection) on ex-Colonial issues.

 

The collection is highly complete for British Commonwealth and French Community from 1948-1980 (there were over sixty individual British colonies that became independent between 1948 and 1960. And when you add areas that weren't colonial themselves, such as British Antarctic Territories and South Georgia, French Southern and Antarctic Territories the number of former British and French Colonies here is probably over 150 different stamp issuing ex-colonial areas that are largely complete mint 1948-1980. So this collection has many tens of thousands of stamps with excellent strength in all the world to 1960 but concentrated on British, French, and Portuguese Colonies with thousands of complete mint sets. The collection catalogs in the low six figures and in the highest quality. Offered completely intact.

Price: $32,500