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Robberies of stamp collections used to be a real problem. In the 1970's a large ring of stamp thieves were caught. They had an APS membership directory with them that they were using to figure out who to knock off next. When I was on the Board of Directors of the APS in the early 1980s, my home was burglarized, as were the homes of several other board members. But, stamp thefts have decreased in recent years and usually when philatelic materials are stolen it is part of a general burglary and not stamp specific. Insurance rates for stamps have dropped dramatically in real terms over the last thirty years. The reasons for the decrease in stamp theft are three. First, stamp prices have declined relative to the value of most other things. A mint US #C18 sold for $200 in 1980. It sells for $40 today and at the price levels for most stamp collections the risk of stealing them is not worth the reward. (Crooks are among the most rational economists around). Second, stamps are hard to fence. The

Hobbies are successful when they allow a diverse group of participants to engage in an activity where they can find enjoyment. Over the last 150 years, philately has been one of the world's most successful hobbies, having millions of devotees. To be successful a hobby has to offer many things. It must have differing levels of appreciation- novices must find it immediately appealing on a visceral (or in the case of philately, visual) level and it must offer increasing pleasures and rewards to participants as they become more involved. If the hobby never gets more serious or involved more intelligent people soon tire of it. Philately is wonderful on this count. From the preliterate child sorting stamps by design to the postal historian's archival wanderings, our hobby has interest to people of all academic and intellectual  levels.

A successful hobby mustn't be too expensive or too cheap. No one can collect O

John Nicklin was one of the most prominent philatelists of his time. He edited the American Airmail catalog, was an editor of the Scott catalog and was president of the Society of Philatelic Americans a group that rivaled the American Philatelic Society in influence but was badly mismanaged in the 1970s and is now out of business. His biography shows us how much we have changed as a hobby and a culture in the last eighty years.

Nicklin was an active philatelic writer in the 1930s. He tells us that his favorite way of spending his vacation was as follows: He would research the older banks and bankrupt trading houses in a geographic area and then use library phonebooks to find possible relatives of the people who ran these companies. He would spend his holiday motoring around, stopping at these people's homes and asking if they had any old correspondence or knew where any was. In one instance, that he himself

There are many types of guarantees in philately and there are many types of opinions. It is important that collectors distinguish between the two and understand what protections each provides. The major expertization services-the APS, the Philatelic Foundation, Professional Stamp Expertizing service, Sergio Sismondo-indeed all of them, offer an opinion, based on current knowledge, of the genuineness and quality of the philatelic item presented to them. This is reassuring to collectors and of value as there are many stamps where the forgeries outnumber the genuine and hidden faults exist on many stamps. But it is important to note that despite the expense involved in having stamps expertized (which is often 5% of the catalog value-with a $25 minimum- and since many stamps are bought at 25% of catalog this can work out to as much as you paid for the stamp itself), it's important to realize that what you are paying for when you expertize a stamp is an opinion only. Traditional certification

Electronic communication has little variable cost. Once the lines are laid, or the satellite launched, electrons fly for free. Not so postal communications where distance travelled matters. Sending a letter from Philadelphia to one of its suburbs costs far less than mail from Philly to Nome, Alaska. World wide postal services began eliminating distance surcharges in 1840 with Rowland Hill's revolution in cheap postage. Before that, letter charges were based on how far the envelope had to go. In the United States, the distance price increased at over 300 miles in the early period and the reason that the United States issued two postage stamps simultaneously-the 5c and 10c 1847- was to pay the distance surcharge.

The reason behind the elimination of distance pricing was that the efficiencies of accounting, rating and collecting the different rates and the increased use of postal service would make up for

There are very few areas of philately that can't be specialized to the max. Take the early postage dues of Romania for instance. Most collectors have just a single example of each of these common stamps but they are known with many perf varieties and especially scarce compound perfs (perforated say 14 at side by 12 at top), some of which are very rare. To specialize in this kind of area one has to know that such varieties in fact exist and then have enough of the material to sift through so as to both find enough material to actually have a collection and also to feel satisfied that you have accomplished something as a collector. This is just an example. Such specialization exists, though, on hundreds of micro areas in our hobby. But for the most part it attracts only a few explorers. In all but a few areas, the vast majority of collectors are content to collect by the catalog and have mostly face different stamps. But there are a few areas of our hobby which collectors have super specialized.

By 1874 the system of international carriage of letters was a mess. Countries had to negotiate postal treaties with each other and most treaties called for cross payments where part of the postage of a letter was remitted by the sending post office to the receiving post office. This was confusing and difficult to keep tabs of but of further complexity was the cross payments to transit countries (say when a letter from the United States landed in England, was sent to Poland and then across land to Russia). Nearly thirty five years after the Penny Black, with world commerce rising, the system of cross payments just wasn't working. It was slowing down communication and as postage rates dropped it was becoming more expensive to account for the letters than to carry them. In 1874 the United States proposed an international congress to discuss the problem and what emerged was an agreement for an organization that was one of the first international cooperation organizations (it was in fact the

Perhaps the greatest change in our hobby in the last 80 years has been in the quality of the product that we collect. Stamps have gone from miniature pieces of art that reflect the skill and technological prowess of the nation that issued them to being little more than a chit indicating payment of postage, usually with a theme to appeal to collectors. The change is not only cultural-taste and artistic standards are lower now than they used to be- but also reflect the diminished roll that letters, and consequently postage stamps, play in our society. Until about 1950 telecommunication was difficult and expensive and was only used for the most important communications. Costs of telephone use has lowered dramatically so that today the largest cost to the telecom companies is not the lines or the satellites but the actual costs of billing customers. Today, most people pay a flat monthly fee for all their telecommunications with no distinction between local and long distance. Email is essentially

Prices and the value of money are difficult to evaluate over time. Readers of Victorian novels know that in the late Nineteenth Century an income of about 150 Pounds a year was the minimum needed to live as a gentleman (Trollope says tartly "an embarrassed gentleman, yes, but a gentleman"). That was three Pounds a week and for that a person could rent an apartment, eat and have a part time servant. Before 1900, prices for food and clothing were proportionately much more expensive and labor was proportionately far cheaper. Sir Walter Scott writes that in his time one could engage a servant for little more than food clothing and shelter. Still, if a middle class person could live a decent life at three Pounds a week in Victorian England and the Post Office issued a stamp for five Pounds it would be the equivalent in spending power to a $1000 stamp today. This raises the question of what could such stamps possibly be used for. Mainly they was used by banks that sent quantities of cash and

We live in a time different in many ways from all the times of the past. Perhaps the most significant difference is the ability for so many people today to have nearly instant gratification of most of their wants. Bored? Turn on the TV or pop in a video game or check out the tweets of anyone you wished you knew. Hungry? We know what the alarming obesity rate tells us about how easy it is to gratify that desire. Our malls are filled with the treasures of the world and most things cost less for the upper middle class in real monetary terms than they have ever cost before. It is easy to see why philately has not attracted the quantity of youth that it had in the past and why our hobby has had slower growth rates in the last twenty years. It is a hobby of a maturer mind-one that understands that the richest pleasures in life are those that are worked for and that patience and effort are required not only until you find that rare item missing from your collection but for most of the lovely

Years ago I taught an evening class in philately at Temple University. The class was made up mainly of well educated people who were either getting back into collecting or who were, never having been stamp collectors, thinking of trying our hobby on for size. At one point after a few weeks the topic of plating was introduced. Most engraved Nineteenth Century stamps were engraved from a single die that was entered into a large plate usually 100 times to make plates of 100. In the earliest period of stamp issuing, such entering of the die to the plate was done by hand, rocking the hardened steel die into the softer unhardened steel or copper plates. The steel of the plate was still pretty hard and considerable effort and rocking back and forth was necessary to make the die impression in the plate. Different entries show different degrees of design strengthening at different places as they were rocked in inconsistently and it is from such tiny differences that philatelists have been able to

There are four broad categories of  bearer labels that have been issued to indicate prepayment for a service or tax. They are postage stamps, revenue stamps, telegraph stamps and telephone stamps. Worldwide  issues of these stamps vary but overall the number of postage stamps greatly exceeds the number of  revenues, telephone and telegraph stamps. Indeed since 1940 there have been virtually no telegraphs and telephone stamps issued and the number of newer revenue issues has greatly declined. The reasons are technological-there are no telegraph systems any more hence no need for tax stamps on

Worldwide postal services have tried numerous experiments over the years at increasing revenues. Most common has been the experiment of advertising with postage stamps. This experiment was first made almost coincidentally with the issuance of the first postage stamp. The Mulready envelope was issued together with the Penny Black as the world's first piece of postal stationery and private companies quickly began advertising on part of the writing page of the stationery. These letter sheets were then sold at discounts from the postage value to people willing to have such advertising with their mail. In the late nineteenth century, New Zealand experimented with placing printed ads on the backs of postage stamps. As these ads could only influence the buyers of the stamps and only then until the stamps were glued to the envelope, they enjoyed limited success and never had government sanctioned use elsewhere. The greatest success for postal advertising has been as se tenants and booklets and

Many collectors spend a great deal of money on their hobby and don't have a great deal to show for It. Your money is yours to do with as you please (after all this is America) but most people take some satisfaction in getting their money's worth when they buy something and, if not always getting the best of all possible deals, at least getting product commensurate with what they have spent. If you wish to do that stay away from estate sales. Many of the worse collections and stocks that I have ever seen have been put together at estate sales where collectors sometimes get good deals but more often compete with other relatively unknowlegeable collectors for overvalued overgraded stamps. There are three reasons for this. First, as mentioned there is often no adult in the room and ignorant sellers selling to unsophisticated  buyers is always dangerous. Forgeries are common and quality is often exaggerated . Second there is no warranty. The seller is not there tomorrow and the buyer has no

In 1960 when a young person started stamp collecting the situation played out like this. A parent took you to a stamp shop or the Minkus concession at a Gimbels or other large department store. You looked at several world wide albums and usually settled on a Harris Statesman Deluxe (or maybe a Citation) which had spaces for 30,000 different stamps and cost a bit less than $5. You bought a pair of stamp tongs that were heavy and nearly took two hands to use,  a thousand Dennison stamp hinges and a world wide packet of probably 5000 different stamps. All told you spent ten or twelve bucks-a decent birthday or Christmas present but a bit less than the Pee Wee Reece model baseball glove which competed with it as as gift (for$19.95). It was the packet of 5000 different stamps that made collecting work in those days and it is the packet that is missing in today's lure of philately for newcomers. The H E Harris company (and others) put these packets together from vast quantities of cheaper sta

Mounting stamps in albums has had four major phases in the 170 years that philately has been a hobby.  In the very beginning, collectors were just saving stamps as a whimsical endeavor.There was no science to collecting and the earliest stamp savers would lick the glue on their mint stamps and place them in their albums (This is why today so many of the earliest issue stamps that exist unused don't have any gum). The first generation of collectors never thought that anyone would want their stamps after them and so no effort was made to mount philatelic items in a way that made them tradeable.

The second generation of collectors learned from this and saw that many specimens that they wanted for their collections had been damaged from faulty mounting

One of the earliest objections to Rowland Hill's idea for a gummed label that indicated prepayment of postage was the fear that such a label could be soaked off and reused. A postage stamp is one of the simplest examples of a bearer certificate-anyone who possesses it can use it to mail a letter and the fear of reuse was very real. Postage of a British penny in 1840, when wages of a pound a week would support a family of four with ease, was the equivalent of perhaps $5 today so such fear had a real basis in fact. The first stamps were cancelled with Maltese cross cancellations which provided a sometimes disfiguring obliteration and the town from which the letter was posted placed its date and town stamp that was used in the stampless cover period on the same letter next to the stamp. This procedure was followed in the United States when we began to issue stamps except that the type of cancellation that was used was left to the individual postmasters. That is why throughout the Nineteenth

Few people today understand the technical revolution that the invention of the postage stamp produced. In many ways, stamp invention had as great an effect on 19th Century communication and commerce as computers and electronic communication has had on ours. Ease of contact facilitated business and social interaction. Business was enhanced. Newspapers and book readership increased as it became cheaper to deliver texts to readers. Social barriers fell as the lower classes could communicate with relatives and have access to employment and commercial opportunities that had been denied them. And the inventor of the postage stamp was fully aware of the social benefits of his ingenuity. Rowland Hill was a passionate progressive who fought for the betterment of the middle classes throughout his life. Opposed to slavery (and remember a prominent part of the Conservative agenda in the pre-1860 period was the rights of private property which included the right to own other human beings) and dedicated

One often sees discussions concerning repairs on lower priced stamps. While collectors do need to be careful about repairs and alterations it is important to remember that stamps are repaired for a reason and that reason is so they can be sold as non damaged items at higher prices than they would be otherwise. Thus repairing a stamp is an economic act, not someone engaging in an esoteric activity. I say this so that you'll keep in mind the two questions that reasonable philatelists ask when they are examining an item for repairs; Why, and when? If a stamp has been in a collection for thirty years and was thought to be a cheap stamp thirty years ago why would anybody waste their time repairing or reperfing it. And when would they have done it?  Keep in mind that perforating pins on early Nineteenth Century stamps were not perfectly placed and even when they were, they could move over the course of thousands of cuts into stamp sheets. So perforations are not always exact on these early stam

The Althing is the parliament of Iceland and is considered to be the oldest Parliament in the world (though whether this is "continuous" or not is subject to some dispute). But the Icelanders are rightfully proud of their Parliament's longevity and have publicized it on two 1930 sets which commemorated the one thousandth anniversary of the Althings founding in 930. These sets have always been popular not only among Iceland philatelists and Scandinavian collectors but among all stamp collectors who like well designed and printed stamps and who like good value for their money. Iceland has always been one of those countries that has enjoyed great philatelic popularity despite limited internal demand for their stamps. Iceland has just over 350,000 inhabitants which puts it, as a country, in the range of the city of Honolulu, Hawaii in terms of size. Like Monaco and Andorra, Iceland has had to rely on collectors outside its borders to maintain and increase demand for its stamps. It has done