Apfelbaum's Corner-John Apfelbaum's Blog on Philately

Junior Duck Stamps

2012-02-01T07:00:00.004-05:00

Revenue from the sale of stamps fund many worthwhile projects. Early in the twentieth century, the first philatelic exposition souvenir sheets were issued to help pay for some of the world's first stamp shows. Most European countries today issue semipostals, stamps with a charity surcharge, to fund the work of the Red Cross or to fight cancer. And many smaller third world counties subsidize their government budgets with profits from the sale of stamps to collectors. America has been lax in using funds from commemorative stamp sales to fund worthwhile projects. Perhaps our secular tradition makes it difficult for quasi government organizations to get involved in charity work which is traditionally seen as the bailiwick of religion. Or perhaps we are such a fragmented society that we can't agree on which charities, if any, are worth government funding. But a diverse constellation of interest groups lined up over the Junior Duck Stamp program. Here is program that is hard to dislike. School children compete to design duck hunting stamps for duck hunters to collect, with the proceeds going to wetlands conservation. Wow- a plan that gets the NRA, the teachers unions, government funding of arts enthusiasts and the Green lobbies on the all on the same side! We should ask the designers of this program to try their hands at peace in the Middle East. The stamps are lovely, well printed and well designed with small print runs. The first few are quite rare. By coincidence we will be offering quite a few of the better ones along with some very rare plate blocks in our next auction.

German Occupation Of Luxembourg

2012-01-31T06:55:00.001-05:00

Luxembourg is a small and wealthy country located between France and Germany. In 1940, Luxembourg was on the invasion route that Nazi forces took to overrun France and the government of Luxembourg was quickly overthrown. As they did for most of the countries that they occupied, the Germans quickly issued occupation stamps. The most remarkable thing about the German occupations were the abundance of philatelic items that they produced. The Third Reich in the early WW II period seemed to do three things particularly well- quickly overrun their enemies, round up Jews and other undesirables for extermination, and create philatelic occupation covers. The cover here was made by a Nazi philatelist who sent the occupation stamps on a registered cover home. The Germans were ( and are) a nation of stamp collectors and much WW II related occupation material exists as momentos sent home by Hans to show where he had been. And the war in the early years was easy for the German Army as it met little resistance. Only as the war bore on and the fighting got fiercer and things went less the Third Reich's way do the philatelically prepared commemorative Occupation covers stop. The philately of the later WW II period is more interesting as it occurred when people tried desperately to keep open lines of communication in war ravaged areas. Then the covers no longer have the quality of party souvenirs.

Stamp Collecting in the 1940s

2012-01-30T08:39:00.000-05:00

The decade of the 1940s was defined by WW II. The totality of the war experience is hard for Americans today to understand. Currently, we have been at war for over ten years with most of the impact for most Americans being the character of the nightly news. WW II required a total mobilization of America. Every man between the ages of 18 and 35 was subject to the draft and most were in the military. Rationing existed for nearly everything and most drivers got a gallon or two of gas a week a no tires. In 3 1/2 years America mobilized and fought a two front war projecting military might around the globe and defeating two powerful enemies at once. It was perhaps the greatest military feat in history and the war's effect on American philately was profound. Most people didn't have time for stamps. Workers were working overtime and the huge military effort took millions of men of prime philatelic age out of the market. Worldwide, the massive destruction of Europe made stamp collecting go into hiding. The world had other things on its mind. Philately regained its footing after 1945 in the US but returning veterans had school, careers and families to build so throughout the decade stamp collecting was on the back burner. Europe, traditionally the center of philately, was devastated and one stamp dealer in particular, J&H Stolow imported millions of European classics into the US at bargain basement prices.

Discount Postage

2012-01-30T06:12:00.000-05:00

For the next week we have a pretty good discount postage offer going. $200 of mint NH US stamps issued from 1960-2000 all of which are still valid for postage. The price for the $200 of postage is 75% or $150 plus $10 shipping and handling. Please email me if you want this with your address and credit card details. One per customer and we may run out so order early. Most groups have duplication, sheets and plates but if you send letters and packages through the post office this is a cheap way to go.

Stamp Collecting in the 1930's

2012-01-29T07:12:00.002-05:00

Philately in the 1930s was defined by two major events- one of major historical import-the Great Depression which virtually destroyed the world wide economy and the other with only philatelic importance- the rise of the stamp dealing firm of H E Harris. Our current economic malaise is serious so imagine how our unemployment rate would feel if it was four times higher than it is now-nearly 40% as it was in 1932. And this in a population of largely one wage earner families so unemployment always meant destitution. There was no unemployment insurance, and bank failures affected nearly everyone because when a bank failed people lost their money as there was no Federal bank insurance. People were not inconvenienced, they were impoverished. And yet stamp collecting flourished and in fact made its first foray into mainstream America. Led by the H E Harris company, which produced the Captain Tim radio show that promoted philately, Harris offered a wide range of inexpensive packets and albums to introduce people to the hobby. And philately was a great hobby for people with lots of time on their hands and little money. It was cheap, required no monthly fees, and the travel it offered was in the collector's mind. It was informative and educational and inculcated the values of thrift and study which a fearful and economically distressed population desired. Probably a higher percentage of Americans collected stamps during the 1930s than at any time before or since.

War Tax Stamps

2012-01-28T07:45:00.001-05:00

Most special stamps relate to postal use and postal purposes. Stamps such as Airmails are higher denominated stamps and the extra revenue is used to defray the cost of the class of service that is being used. But War Tax stamps are a different animal entirely-they are a country using its postal service to generate revenue for another purpose, in this case war funding. The first War Tax stamps were issued by Spain in the late Nineteenth Century and War Tax stamps have been issued as late as 1974 in Bahrain. But by far the most significant use of War tax stamps was in the British Commonwealth for raising revenue for WW I. Most of the Colonial issues are overprints, but Canada produced different stamps for War Tax one of which is illustrated here. They way War Tax stamps produced revenue was that after a certain date all letters had to bear a tax stamp in addition to the postage stamp and all revenue from the sale of the tax stamps went to the war effort. The United States had a tidier solution- one that shows the close revenue relationship between the United States Post Office and the US Treasury that existed in the earlier era. The United States just raised postage rates in 1917 by 50% (from 2c for a first class letter to 3c) to help fund the war effort and this increase remained in effect for nearly two years at which time postage rates reverted to their prewar levels.

Tobacco

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

Economic theory extols the virtue of trade and many anthropologists credit trade with being among the human inventions that most advanced civilization and material wealth. Stamps facilitated trade as their invention and use made communications easier, and ease of communications is one of the conditions that improves trade. Throughout the Nineteenth Century it was agricultural products that were the most traded and tobacco was one of the most widely traded and transported agricultural commodities. Tobacco was addictive so its market was ever expanding and unresponsive to changes in taste and fashion. Tobacco grew only in certain climates far removed from Europe where it was needed and tobacco required little care after harvesting making it an ideal crop for transport and trade. Rats didn't eat it and it could be stored for a long time. The letter illustrated above ( and we scanned the folded letter and then opened it out so you can read it) is an example of the kind of interrelatedness of stamps and trade that makes postal history so interesting. It is a printed tobacco circular from 1877 from a tobacco merchant and importer in London to a grower in Lynchburg Virginia. An interesting thing about this circular is the fact that is handwritten and then printed in a sort of mimeograph process. This was an attempt by the merchant to make the letter look like a personal one while at the same time preserving the advantages of the "circular" postage rate. At this time private letters from Great Britain to the US were a shilling a piece as opposed to 1p for a circular so the London tobacco merchant was maximizing his direct mail dollars by the way he sent this letter. This is yet another thing that stamp collecting shows us. Though products and technology change, marketing still has the same goals it always has had.

Large Queens

2012-01-26T07:19:00.001-05:00

Among the most interesting specializations in our hobby are the stamps of Canada and especially the issue of 1880-1890 that are called the "Large Queens". The name that philatelists have given this set refers to their physical relationship to the set of stamps that came after them. These stamps are large-the next issues was much smaller. Large Queens have several interesting philatelic points going for them, primarily the fact that there are so many varieties to collect. The stamps themselves are well printed and attractive and the varieties ensure that a specialist never comes to end of items to acquire. There are perf varieties and paper varieties, especially three of the stamps being issued on Laid paper (all of the Laid paper varieties are rare). There are watermarked varieties as these stamps were issued on paper as it could be purchased and for different printings that sometimes meant paper that was watermarked. And there are shades galore. In fact the 15c value is printed in a color similar to the 24c 1861-67 of the United States (#70 and 78). Early inks in the violet shade were very difficult to match printing to printing and have changed color over time depending on handling and light so that is more difficult to find two 15c Large Queens that match in color than two that are different. And the price of the stamps makes them an interesting specialty as well as they are very affordable considering their age and rarity. The stamps have a high catalog value (about $800 per set) but like most of Nineteenth Century Canadian stamps can currently be bought at about 10% of catalog at reputable auctions in Fine to Very Fine condition.

British Honduras

2012-01-25T07:28:00.002-05:00

British Honduras was the only Colony in Latin America, British, Spanish, Portuguese or French, that wasn't set up to extract silver or gold or produce the eighteenth and nineteenth century agricultural equivalent, sugar. British Honduras was an extractive colony of a different kind-it was set up to harvest timber. Some of the finest trees in the world, especially mahogany, grow there and the British had received economic rights to the Colony as early as 1783. British Honduras then was run as a massive timber camp, with slave labor of course, though timber is less labor intensive than sugar and required a smaller population. The population of British Honduras never exceeded 30,000 and the ratio of slave and Indian to white was about ten to one. This has made legitimately used British Honduras stamps of the nineteenth and early twentieth century among the most difficult to find in our hobby. The stamps are well produced and have many elusive high values and have the added interest of being the only classic British Colonial stamps to be denominated in dollars. There were a series of currency crisis in the late Nineteenth Century in the United States and Europe relating to the backing of currency by gold or silver. Most of British Honduras's exports were to the US so the decision was made to use currency tied to the US dollar instead of the British system used by the rest of the British Empire.

Stamp Collecting in the 1920s

2012-01-24T06:00:00.001-05:00

Suppose you were a fellow collector of my grandfather Earl Apfelbaum in the 1920s. The probability is that you would be a world wide collector with perhaps a single country concentration. You would have a hardbound Scott album or a McKeels album as Minkus and Harris were still years in the future. You mounted your stamps with hinges and the prevailing philatelic dispute was not over "hinged" versus "never hinged" but over whether the new fangled invention of peelable hinges was worth the additional price (previous to the invention of "peelable glassine hinges", hinges took off most of the gum if you could remove them at all). The Scott catalog was one volume in less than 300 pages and for your $2.95 you got a listing of all the stamps in the world in a hardbound volume. Everyone belonged to a stamp club and the better clubs set up "catalog clubs" where everyone put in a penny or a nickle a month so that the club could purchase a new volume of Scott each year. Philately was far more social. Collecting meant belonging to a club for trading stamps and visits to the local stamp dealer shops of which there were thousands nationwide. Travelling for business or pleasure always meant a visit to a local shop or club and the different kinds of duplicates that each visitor had for trade made newcomers welcomed indeed. Today a person could put together a wonderful collection of stamps and never meet another collector. That was impossible in 1925.

One Percent

2012-01-23T07:00:00.002-05:00

Philately is a far more democratic hobby than most. In America today, the top 1% of people own about 40% of societal assets. Such a pyramided wealth schema is probably true of many of the more serious collector hobbies as well. Outside of museums, the top 1% probably owns nearly all the Old Master paintings or Picassos. And all the fine antique collectible jewelry. That is not a problem in those fields because there are so few works available and each work is unique so that a collector could own more than one. But if philately were a hobby where the one percent controlled such a high percentage of the assets of the hobby, our hobby would be in sad shape indeed. There are perhaps 250,000 serious stamp collectors today in the US ("serious" defined loosely as collecting more than just new postage stamps as they are issued and having a long term interest in matters philatelic). Think what such a control of philatelic wealth in the one percent would mean. There are 50,000 Zepp sets. If the 2500 "1%" collectors (1% of 250,000 collectors) owned 20,000 Zepp sets (40% of 50,000 zepp sets) that would be ten sets per collector. Would there be a ready market for these stamps at anything like the current price? Concentration of philatelic wealth in so few hands would depress demand significantly as the collectors at the top would need nothing, have ten of everything and only buy items perceived to be cheap. Philatelic demand would be significantly depressed. Fortunately for the financial health of our hobby the kind of wealth concentration that is hindering America's recovery is not at play in our hobby.

Stamp Shows

2012-01-22T07:00:00.002-05:00

Forty years ago the stamp selling world was divided into four main methods of sale. There were retail stamp shops, stamp auctions, dealer price lists and stamp shows. Apfelbaum attended over thirty shows a year as bourse dealers and I did most of them. The show life was a hard life. Packing up your stock each week and flying it to a different part of the country, the time changes and the late nights and the constant booth set up and take down. The up sides were that you got to meet more collectors in a weekend than you could usually meet in a year and you got to know them and hear their concerns. What amazed me then and what has made for the tremendous success of the Internet as a selling mechanism for philately is the tremendous diversity in collector specialization. Most collectors maintain basic stamp collections and yet most of the collectors who came to our booth at shows seemed to be looking for things like covers with postage dues used to small islands or state and county postal history. With the millions of philatelic items on offer on the Internet and the powerful search engines, collectors have the world's supply of stamps and covers on offer every day. For purchasing a $5 Columbian or a set of Graf Zeppelins, stamp shows are still a good bet. For an expensive item it is nice to see it first and meet the seller. But for the vast group of philatelic subspecialties it is easy to see why most collectors and dealers have chosen to meet in the virtual world. By the way, I will be at Orco Expo next week in Southern California and if you would like to meet to discuss the sale of your stamps send me an email or give me a call.

Chile

2012-01-21T07:18:00.001-05:00

Chile is the wealthiest country in Latin America. The country lies along a narrow strip of land along the west coast of the South American continent bordered by the Andes mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Chile's climate ranges from some of the driest hottest deserts to frozen Antarctic landscapes. It's wealth is multidimensional based on mineral wealth including copper, and great agricultural produce including fruits and wines. Philatelically, Chile is fairly simple though the country is an interesting one to collect. The first issues (the imperforate Columbus heads) are very specialized and Scott lists different printings with the same plates as different stamps which is more specialized than most people need. But after that the stamps are pretty straight forward and not very expensive though not easy to find. Chile has long had one of the more conservative stamp issuing policies and even today the Chilean post office issues only about twenty stamps per year. There are less than 2000 different stamps needed to complete the country compared to 6500 for Grenada which has issued a staggering 6000 stamp issues per hundred thousand population ( if China had issued as many stamps per capita as Grenada it would have over 500,000 different stamp issues by now). And a complete Chile collection can be assembled for a modest price for such a major country with so many well designed stamps-probably for under a thousand dollars- a complete country for the price of a set of Zepps.

Libya

2012-01-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

The Arab spring which started out so peacefully with the change of the governments of Egypt and Tunisia took a turn for the more violent this summer when NATO was involved in the overthrow of the Libyan government. Libyan stamps have now begun their fourth phase. First, there were the issues of the Italian Colony of Libya which issued over a hundred different stamps before 1951. After WW II and the Italian occupation, there were the Independence issues which were issued from 1951-1969. In 1969, Muammar Gadaffi staged a coup and became the sole ruler of Libya for over 40 years until he was overthrown last summer. Libya has a large geographic area but a small population and is largely desert and had a largely nomadic population until oil was discovered. The oil wealth of Libya is enormous and hopefully will not be squandered under the new government as it was under Gadaffi. I have always been partial to Italian Colony stamps. They are very well printed and hard to find without being terribly pricey. From an investment or popularity point of view collectors should try to find countries that have a dual pull-that is appeal to collectors of more than one area. The classic stamps of Libya are needed for both Libya collectors and collectors of the Italian area. If you decide to add a few Libyan stamps to your collection don't forget to look at Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which were two provinces of Libya which issued their own stamps in the 1930s.

Envy

2012-01-19T05:54:00.001-05:00

The concept of envy has been in the press recently in a non philatelic context. Envy is the feeling of pain at that which someone else has and which you wish that you had. Philately is one of the hobbies one would think would be most prone to envy. After all most collectors are after the same items and most philatelic material is sold at auction which means that competition for material is largely a matter of size of wallet. Perhaps some of the appeal of ultraspecialization is to keep the fires of envy from burning too fiercely in the specializing collector. If he is the only one who can appreciate the importance and scarcity of the item he desires he runs no risk of losing it to others and fanning his envy. But another factor plays in here and it is that which has gotten so much press in the political arena. Some people's main drive in acquiring important philatelic material or material goods is to stoke the envy of others. Their self esteem is enhanced by eliciting envy in others. Most of us would like to own an airmail invert and are happy for the collector who does. Most owners of airmail inverts are doing so because they are serious collectors who want and can afford the best. But there are a subset of collectors and politicians who see envy in others when it is really they who feel joy at being able to tease out that feeling by ungracious displays of ostentation.

Color

2012-01-18T06:46:00.001-05:00

Color and shades are one of the most overdone areas of our hobby. During the earliest years of collecting, before 1900, there were simply not enough new stamp issues for the amount of time that collectors had to devote to our hobby. Collectors then parsed and refined their specialties and one way to do this was by shade. Collecting this way ignores the reality that certain colors, blues and reds especially, degrade and change over time especially depending on exposure to light or air. What we call different shades today are often due merely to different handling criteria on 100 year old stamps that may have well been printed next to each other on a sheet. When significant shade variations exist, they should be saved and studied. When different printings at different times produces different shades then of course they should be saved. But just two anecdotes to end this post. Many years ago I did a year long study on the three major shade differences of the United States 3c 1851-the ordinary red #65, the rose pink #64b, and the true pink #64 (the last two were PFC certified copies (though defective). I put them out on a corner of a table in our office where every day they received full office fluorescent light. At the end of a year neither of the two pink shades would have retained any chance of being certified as the valuable shades. And the second story is about one prominent expertiser who has a predilection for Pigeon Blood pinks (Scott #64a) the super rare 3c 1861 shade and who will give certificates on this rare stamp when the shade exists mainly in his own eye. Paying big money for minor shade varieties is dangerous.

Postage Dues

2012-01-17T05:01:00.001-05:00

Postage Dues are one of what are called special service stamps, that is stamps issued for special postal purposes. Such stamps include Parcel Posts, which are stamps intended to be used on packages, Officials which are stamps used on government mail and all of the array of Newspapers and postal tax stamps that grace the back of each country's catalog listing. All major countries, with the exception of Germany, have issued Postage Due stamps and they are unusual as they are more of an accounting device than a real prepaid postal label which is what other postage stamps and special service stamps are. Postage dues are issued to facilitate internal post office accounting and to let the carrier know that there is money to collect on delivery. The United States issued more Postage Dues than all but a few countries and the Postage Dues of the United States present a difficult and pricey challenge. It is an odd fact of US philately that our special services stamps-our Postage Dues, Officials, Revenues, Newspapers and Locals- are each among the most difficult and pricey of their specific areas of philately. Many European dealers consider US philately about the most difficult of all countries to master and it is our special service stamps, with postage dues in the forefront, that makes this so.

Jordan

2012-01-15T07:00:00.002-05:00

Middle Eastern stamps are very appealing for a few reasons. First they are politically fascinating. Nearly all of the Middle East was under Turkish control until after WW I. The breakup created a power vacuum which brought Britain and France into play both with and against local populations in setting up new governments. The philately reflects this with a wide range of locally produced stamps under changing postal administrations. And the stamps are all scarce and for the most part under appreciated and under valued all of which makes the possibility for collector "finds" (which are fun) and for rising prices. One of my favorite sets is the 1933 Jordan pictorial. This set represents the first set in the modern period of Middle Eastern philately. Before about 1930, most of the stamps of Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia were surcharged on stamps of Turkey or France. This Jordan set had its own designer and printer and depicted the current ruler of the country and as such they represent the first true Independence issues of this country. This set above is not cheap-it sells for about $500- but considering how scarce it is and how rarely it is offered for sale and the potential for the stamps of this area to greatly increase in popularity, it is a very good buy for the future if you can find one.

Stamps Memories

2012-01-14T07:00:00.008-05:00

Like most collectors, different stamps take me back to different times in my life. In the 1960's my parents sent me to overnight camp and the stamp they sent me with to post my letters home was the 1963 Food For Peace stamp. Every time I see this stamp in a collection I have memories of loneliness and joy at writing home and the connection which that stamp gave me to people I loved and missed. The stamp illustrated at the top triggers a different memory. In the 1970's I was traveling in Italy with my new wife. We were driving in the Italian Alps on a toll road and I came to a stop to pay a toll. Italy was experiencing a change shortage at this time and, rather than give change, drivers received postage stamps to round out their toll payments to the nearest 5000 Lire. I received this 1000 lire Parcel Post stamp as change from the toll taker. Being a stamp collector I immediately knew that this stamp came with two watermarks-the short lived and very valuable "wing and double circle" worth about $3000 and the very common" star" worth about 30 cents. My wife says she realized then what she was in for, as I went zooming down the exit ramp holding the stamp against the wind shield trying to see the watermark, risking our lives on the chance of finding a rare variety. It was the cheap one of course. No doubt the toll taker was a philatelist too.

Political Orientation of Stamp Collectors

2012-01-13T07:16:00.001-05:00

Observers of philatelists have long believed that stamp collectors are a very conservative group politically. We don't have Gallup polls, but through letters to the editor of philatelic publications and personal conversations most of us believe our group to be well to the right on the political spectrum. True we have our liberal outliers but if only stamp collectors were to vote in the 2012 Presidential election it is likely that we'd be criticizing a President Romney a year from now rather than a President Obama. But with political affiliations, demography is destiny and as a group stamp collectors tend to be more conservative largely because they tend to be older, whiter and maler than the population as a whole. Create a group of demographic specs-a young, urban, Hispanic woman for instance- and a political scientist call tell the percentage liklihood that she is a Democrat or Republican. Oddly, and again this is anecdotal, I think that stamp collectors are actually less politically conservative than their straight demographic make up should suggest. This is because there are a number of very well educated philatelists. Again demographically though political affiliation sways rightward the wealthier and older a person gets, the more years of post graduate education that a person has seems to counterbalence back to the left. Philately has always attracted the well educated and so has had a more leftward leaning population than straight demographics would suggest. My guess is that given all these factors that among serious stamp collectors there is about a 60/40 skew towards Republican affiliation among people in our hobby.

Amtrak and The Post Office

2012-01-12T05:42:00.001-05:00

A question that Americans are going to have to answer in the next few years is whether we want to keep our post offices open and have them continue their daily trips serving us all with mail. We have reluctantly made this decision with Amtrak. Rail travel is not a money maker but we have decided that the benefits of allowing people to go from city to city and not use their cars is a good that accrues to society that we are all willing to pay for. This is what a government does-collect revenue from us all in a way that the majority deems fair and parcels it out in ways that society deems fair. Social Security and Medicare are programs similar to Amtrak and mail delivery (with the added benefit of having a larger constituency). Several European countries, such as Holland, have made their decision and have largely privatized mail delivery. But Holland is an overwhelming urban country where private delivery companies can easily cover most addresses. How will Kansas like their communications being handled by a combination of Fed Ex and a scanner? Society exists to provide security and benefits for its members. Most people, liberals and conservatives, are very comfortable with the benefits that they receive from society and are adverse to having their benefits reduced. Most of us realize what a tremendous benefit cheap, reliable and rapid postal communications are. We have had it since birth and most of us take it for granted. Most of us would be very unhappy indeed if it were seriously modified or taken away. As the public discussion over the future of the Post Office occurs over the coming years keep in mind what a wonderful benefit it is and how, if we can find money for Amtrak, we should be able to find money to insure that we all retain our postal deliveries.

Stamp Newspapers

2012-01-11T06:23:00.001-05:00

The high point of stamp journalism was in the 1930s. Scores of weekly and monthly philatelic periodicals existed, many of them only a few pages and many of the journals existing for only a few issues. The Great Depression put many people out of work and printing companies had tremendous excess capacity so there were many people with time to write and publish and printing costs were cheap. WW II put many of the less significant publications out of business as rationing made printing more difficult and the war meant full employment here at home. In the last sixty years the history of philatelic journalism has been one of decreasing resources and readership. In the 1970s there were four large general circulation weeklies having a combined readership of over 200,000 stamp collector and dealer readers firsthand (the surveys at the time said the the average stamp weekly was passed on to 2.5 additional readers so the weekly readership totals were probably closer to half a million). Much of the weekly press was light news that wrapped around dealer advertising price lists. As the Internet has made print redundant for advertising, philatelic publications have fallen away. Today, Linns is the only weekly left and has about 35,000 subscribers. The latest issue is 52 pages, about a third of its former heft and four of the pages are advertisements from the publisher hawking products that they sell. Collectors will continue to get most of their information from the web. But the difficulty for our hobby is the same as the difficulty for most subjects that require the use of Internet search engines to obtain results. There is little discrimination. Years ago a good editor filtered what collectors read. Rather than being censorship, the editorial function shepherded collectors towards the information that was most useful for them, that was accurate and that had the greatest utility for the amount of time that was required to read it. Today, with so much unfiltered information, collectors can be stuffed at the smorgasbord and sometimes miss tasty articles they could be enjoying to make their experience in their hobby more rewarding. All information is not created equal. And one of the problems of the Internet age is determining what to read and what to learn.

Pay Pal

2012-01-10T07:13:00.001-05:00

This article about Pay Pal requiring a buyer to destroy an item he thought was counterfeit rather than returning it occurred in the violin collecting field but has interest for stamp collectors. Counterfeits are a problem in every collector field but raise many interesting issues in philately. First, philately has counterfeits that were created to defraud collectors. These should be destroyed or at least marked indelibly when they are identified. But philately also has reprints, sometimes official, sometimes clandestine, which have legitimate status as collectibles. And we have postal forgeries-counterfeits but counterfeits that were made to defraud the post and not collectors. In many ways, postal forgeries are among the most interesting of all philatelic collectibles especially if they are legitimately used to defraud the post. And then how about repairs and regumming which add a counterfeit layer to a genuine collectible? Certainly there has been a lack of policing in all of the collectible fields. But requiring buyers to destroy items which they deem forgeries, even with third party confirmation, seems to be too strong a solution for the problem.

United States Graf Zeppelins

2012-01-09T08:23:00.003-05:00

Every United States collector wants the United States Graf Zeppelin set. Issued over 80 years ago the set was sold to pay the postage on zeppelin flights that originated in the United States. Zeppelin mail was intended to be an alternative to airmail and offered the ability to carry large quantities of mail on transatlantic routes. The mail was expensive, but fast, and in 1930 airplane mail to Europe was possible but weight restrictions made it impractical. But the future of zeppelin mail went up in smoke with the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937 and Graf Zeppelin postage stamps went the way of Pony Express stamps as collectibles that shed light on the history of communications. Graf Zeppelin stamps have always been among the most popular United States issues. The face value of the stamps was $4.55 and they were issued in 1930, the first year of the Great Depression. Sales were very limited and the issue was soon taken off sale. We have four very nice sets available. Each is Extremely Fine full original gum and pristine Never Hinged- The 2011 Scott catalog value is $1900 and you can have your choice for $1095 postpaid. Just email me with the set you want using the stock number next to the set.

Peter Holcombe

2012-01-08T07:00:00.001-05:00

I read today that Peter Holcombe has passed away. Peter was one of the dwindling few of world wide dealer/experts that used to be prominent in the hobby. Peter was born in England and lived the last thirty years of his life in Switzerland. For most of his life he was an active dealer but for the last few years he was more of an expertiser. He tended towards the most esoteric regions of our hobby from Greece and Greek area to Chinese overprints and Thailand. He was especially good with British Commonwealth stamps. He issued certificates and signed stamps and was one of the more active expertisers in the world until he slowed down some ten years ago. Experts like Holcombe, not committees, used to be the norm in world wide philately. The Americans and the British have gravitated away from individual experts to where the Royal, British Philatelic Association, Philatelic Foundation, American Philatelic Expertisation service, PSE are all "committee expertisers" where stamps are supposedly passed on by several experts not one. The German Bundersprufer system has retained the old system. It is a federation of experts but each area still has one expert and that expert is the one who examines and passes on your stamps. Our system is supposed to be more sure, the idea being that the knowledge of the collective is greater than that of any individual. All I know for sure is that the American system is slower-getting an opinion can take months, not hours. And as far as surer? I would put my money out faster on a Peter Holcombe certificate on classic Greece than I would on any of the "committee experts" that I know.

Duck Stamps

2012-01-07T08:28:00.001-05:00

Every country has peculiarities of its specialization. The Germans have coil numbers printed on the back of stamps and collect their coils in strips of eleven to prove that the stamps didn't come from a sheet which was printed with rows no larger than ten. The French collect gutter pairs with plate numbers, called millisimes. The Swedes measure the perfect centeredness of their socked-on-the-nose cancels. But no country collects their revenue stamps like the United States. No country includes such a broad array of revenues in the specialty catalogs as are listed in the Scott US Specialized catalog. No country lists Privately issued revenues such as the US Match and Medicines. And finally, no country has so many or so avidly collected Duck Stamps. The Hunting Permits, or Ducks, as they are called are issued each year and have been since 1935 to pay the Federal tax on Duck Hunting. They are probably the greatest crossover philatelic item. More non stamp collectors collect Duck stamps (as part of their passion for duck hunting) than collect any other kind of philatelic item. It is a tribute to the passion and political power of duck hunters that the price of a duck stamp has not gone up in over thirty years. Hunting taxes are user fees which government has been hiking up for years so as to not have to raise tax rates. But America's millions of hunters in every House district in the land have seen to it that their hunting taxes have remained low. Duck stamps are among the most popular sub specialty in US philately and a complete mint set can be assembled for about $1500 mint hinged, $2000 NH and $500 used.

Louis Robbins

2012-01-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

Lou Robbins also was inducted into the APS Hall of Fame this year and was another old time philatelist with whom I had a life long relationship. Lou was 98 when he died and had been living in assisted living for many years. Lou was primarily a stamp auction agent. A stamp auction agent in the modern on-line auction world is a bit like a buggy whip was in the early automotive era-decorative but for most people not very useful. An auction agent would attend all the philatelic auctions (and in the 1950's and 1960's there were 20 or more sales a month in New York alone) and would execute bids from clients. Dealers and collectors gave their bids to agents, rather than directly to the auction house, for one of four reasons-either they didn't trust that the auction house would execute their bids fairly, perhaps disclosing their high bid to other bidders, or the bidders didn't want the auction house to know their top bid in the event they were the winner, or the collector or dealer wanted an impartial eye to view the lots before the sale, or the bidder wished to limit or reduce his bids as the sale progressed depending on how much he had already bought. A good agent had a good eye and a quick mind. And Lou was the best of his time. When he came to our auctions in the 1960's he would typically be bidding for thirty or more clients and they would usually be the heaviest hitters. Once, during a particularly heavy snow, Lou's train from New York was late. There were no cell phones to alert us but we knew he was held up by forces beyond his control or he would be there. So we held up starting the session. In he finally ran, and he bid on lot one with his hat and coat still on.

Bud Sellers

2012-01-05T06:22:00.007-05:00

I opened my January American Philatelist yesterday and saw that F.Burton Sellers was one of the winners of the American Philatelic Society's Hall of Fame award this year. Unlike baseball's Hall of Fame which is for the living and dead alike, The APS's Hall of Fame is only for deceased philatelists who have had a measurable impact on our hobby. Bud died in 2010 at the age of 92 and for most of the years that he was active in the hobby I knew him well. In 1975 when the Interphil organizing committee was having last minute troubles with the preparations for the International show that was planned for Philadelphia the next year, Bud was asked to step in and reorganize the management structure of the organization, which he did in his usual seamless manner. We served on the APS Board of Directors together twice. He was an unusual combination of effective manager and team player. He combined impeccable philatelic skills with great managerial acumen. Being an effective officer of a philatelic organization requires both achievements-sort of like a college president in the old days who needed to be a prominent scholar before they could ascend to a job that required first rate business ability. The skill sets are quite different and are not always found in the same person. Bud combined them and added a folksy charm that made him everyone's best friend even when he was advocating positions that were quite different from ones that you thought were best for philately. Bud made a comment once that defined his philosophy and is a good lesson for dealing with obstreperous people. At an APS Board meeting we were discussing what our response should be to an unfair and brutal attack on the APS that had appeared in print. Most of us were for filing a strong and equally incendiary response. But Bud advocated not attacking the person who had slandered us. His reason-"Never get in a pissing contest with a skunk".

The New European Recession

2012-01-04T05:57:00.002-05:00

Economic statistics in recent months indicate that Europe is slipping into recession. This is more or less government policy as the response to the Euro debt crisis has been austerity which has reduced demand and output and is now causing unemployment and recession. The effect of a European recession on the stamp market will be serious. There are essentially four worldwide stamp markets, which overlap to varying degrees but which are largely independent of each other. They are the US-Canada market which is primarily confined to USA and Canada specialty collectors in North America. Many collectors around the word collect US but market strength is driven but demand in the US. British Commonwealth is another great philatelic market and this market is probably the most international of all stamp markets. Obviously this is the strongest collecting area in Britain but British Commonwealth stamps are the second most popular stamp specialty in just about every collecting market. This is what makes the price of British Commonwealth so stable-it would take a world wide philatelic price decline, not just weakness in one area, to affect British Commonwealth stamp prices. Asian stamps are another great philatelic market. The growth and maturity of this market has been the major change in philatelic economics in the last twenty years but as yet Asian collectors have not moved much beyond their home markets. But the biggest and strongest worldwide philatelic market is, and always has been, the European market. And Europeans don't just collect their home country stamps either. They are serious philatelists and are contributors to the market strength of the other major philatelic markets, especially British Commonwealth. Market weakness in the Euro block is not good news for stamps.

Penny Blacks

2012-01-03T07:45:00.003-05:00

The Penny Black is not only the first stamp but one of the more fun stamps to specialize in. The stamp was printed in twelve plates and each plate had 240 subjects. As a security measure each stamp received check letters in the corners so that each of the 240 subjects of each plate are unique (the check letters made counterfeiting more difficult as forgers would have to reproduce more than one specific lettered stamp or the overabundance of the same check letter would lead to suspicion. Further the check letters eliminated the concern that partially cancelled stamps would be soaked off, cut, and reassembled on letters). With twelve plates and 240 stamps per plate a specialist has 2880 different Penny Blacks that are needed to have a complete run of plates and check letters. Further, specialists can collect by cancellation and date, blocks, pairs and multiples. Most collectors keep it simple and are happy to have one. We just bought a few Very Fine four margin, fault free Penny Blacks. These are tough to find as the margins between the stamps were small and people who were using them on letters didn't think that collectors 170 years later were going to want four full margin stamps. Further early collectors didn't care much for quality so stamps were often torn or scraped off envelopes. But these three above are perfect and they catalog $350 each. You can have anyone you want, subject unsold, for $90 postpaid. Just email me and tell me which one you want by the check letters.

The Coming Boom In Philately

2012-01-02T08:07:00.001-05:00

We are only a price increase away from seeing philately re-emerge as the kind of hobby it was when the baby boomers were young. This is my takeaway from several year end parties that I attended. In the course of conversation people asked what I do and when people hear that I am a stamp dealer the usual response is to tell me about the First Day Covers and plate blocks that these middle aged men collected as kids. A significant number get wistful, remembering the fun they had acquiring items for their collection. Most would like to collect again only they feel its a kid's hobby. They are enticed by the study and the serious aspect of the hobby, but they are hard nosed business people and professionals. Golf is justified because it is social and a bit of exercise. But to have an avocation like stamps wouldn't play well to their social group unless there was some additional reason to collect beyond the joy that it gives. So if stamps could reacquire their investment patina our hobby would take off among this group of ex collectors. I always felt that the appeal of philately was visceral and that people collected for reasons that are in addition to the reasons that they think they are collecting for. I have seen savvy investors who claimed that their hobby was all dollars and cents light up when they get the stamp that completes the page and how about the countless hours of searching that most collectors put in to find the just right item for their collection. If we could add "smart with your money" to the mix of pleasures that our hobby confers, then we will have a philatelic boom like no other before.

A Good Investment Bet

2012-01-01T07:56:00.008-05:00

I don't like to tout stamps as an investment because in reality most collectors don't make money out of their collections (In the last ten years most stock investors didn't make money either, and home owners got clobbered, so philatelists are in good company). But there is one stamp that I think if you were to buy for a newborn grandchild would stand a pretty good chance of paying for a good part of a year's college tuition when he or she is ready. It is the 25 Rupee Edward VII of India mint. First, it has always been a scarce and undervalued stamp even when "children starving in India" was a metaphor for abject poverty. But India is one of the great economies now and could well outpace China in growth in the years ahead. Indian stamps have become very popular, tremendously increasing in price but, still, on a rarity to price basis, compared to China, they have an enormous way to go. The 25 Rupee is the scarcest twentieth century stamp of India. It currently catalogs for $925 but the last one we sold brought $1200 plus 18% commission. That's not chicken feed but with savings bonds paying less than 1/2% I think young Aiden or Sophia will thank you if you put some better stamps away for them.

The World's Biggest Philatelic Market Discovers Foriegn Stamps

2011-12-31T07:58:00.001-05:00

The best news for 2012 is the realization that the largest philatelic market in the world, the Chinese market, has begun to expand its horizons. Philatelic markets mature like people do. Newer philatelic markets are narrow and collectors in these markets rarely show interest in stamps beyond their own country. As the markets mature the collectors tend to expand their interests. They do this for two reasons. First many of them have soon acquired all the stamps that they want and can afford of their home country. And second, as collectors mature they begin to see the appeal and specialty interest in the stamps of other countries. We began to see this in the Russian and Eastern European markets in the 1990's. Long dominated by home country collectors, the Russians, in particular, began to collect the stamps of other countries so that they have become major buyers of scarcer British Commonwealth material. This is because of intrinsic specialty interest but also a way for collectors to divest their philatelic holdings from home country markets that are volatile due to economic and currency concerns. Increasingly, mainland Chinese collectors seem to be doing the same and 2011 has marked the first year where we sold good amounts of non Chinese stamps to that country. If this pattern holds, it bodes very well for our hobby.

Classic India

2011-12-30T06:59:00.003-05:00

When you buy a house or a car there is a cost of production involved that provides a floor as to the price. If housing prices drop to below the cost of producing homes people will stop building them, supplies will contract leading to price increases that will allow production to resume. At least that's the theory. So the housing market or the automobile market is not a perfect market in terms of supply and demand because supply is influenced by the cost of production. But the stamp market is a perfect economic model of a market. Older stamps that can not be used as postage really have no value except for what collectors are willing to pay for them. They can't be used for anything or consumed in any way. The early stamps of India are a perfect example of the fact that stamps are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. Compare the classic mint stamps of India with the classic mint stamps of China. Dealers see five or ten times as much classic China as India and yet the former sells at prices of ten times as much. I think the answer has to do with free(ish) rather that controlled political systems. The Chinese are trying to pull off a political/economic coup that has never before been successful-a controlled political system with free market capitalism. Wealthy Chinese are frightened and are hedging their success in things other than currency and stocks. The India stamp market is a pure collector market. It should continue to perform well as India completes her transition to a major economic power.

European Catalogs

2011-12-29T05:38:00.000-05:00

There are three main Foreign catalogs for the non English speaking European specialties-Michel for Germany and German Area, Yvert for France and French Colonies and Sassone for Italy and the Italian Area. Michel is the Mercedes of catalogs with hundreds of thousands of specialized listings in all phases of German philately with covers, blocks, paper types and cancellations all addressed and priced. Michel Deutchland Specialized is the prototype of what a specialty catalog should be and no other country's specialized catalog comes even close. Yvert's France and Colonies catalog is good, handles well though without much excitement or acceleration-sort of like a Peugeot. Yvert's listing often go little beyond Scott (especially the wonderful Scott Specialized) but still overall is a capable model. Sassone, the Italian catalog is sort of like a hybrid Maserati/Fiat. Some sections are excellent (modern printing varieties for instance) and it has thousands of listings that are beyond Scott. That's the Maserati part. The Fiat part is no index, lack of consistency in listings (certain types of varieties are listed for some areas but not for others) and crazy high, often meaningless pricing. In years before Bablefish all of these catalogs could sometimes be daunting to use but now there us no reason for a serious collector not to have at least an older edition on their shelves. Especially when older editions can be bought reasonably on EBay.

Valuing Modern Mint Stamps in Hinged Condition

2011-12-28T07:14:00.000-05:00

The Scott catalog prices for most countries after 1940 is for stamps in mint Never Hinged condition. This is for three reasons. First, most post 1940 stamp are more common in NH than in hinged condition (especially as you come closer to the current period in time). Second, most collectors have been trained to believe they want NH stamps. And third, the foreign catalogs from which Scott steals its prices only list their stamps in NH condition. So the question often arises about how one should value foreign hinged stamps in the modern period. As auctioneers our experience has given us the following answers to this question. The effect of hinging on mint modern stamps is more significant the further you go back to the 1940 cutoff that the Scott catalog uses. Stamps from most European and British area countries in the 1940-1960 period sell, in hinged condition, for 1/3 to 2/3s of their NH price. As one moves closer to the current period the ratio of hinged to NH price gets closer so that when we sell mint collections of the last twenty years it doesn't seem to matter much if the stamps are hinged or Never Hinged. I suspect this is for two reasons. First, the quantities of mint stamps from the last two decades is small because so few were put away and they haven't recycled through the philatelic resale market yet. Because so few were put away collector demand is high and so hinging matters less. And second, the face value of modern stamps is a big determinant of the price, with the Scott policy that many modern stamps catalog at twice their original face value. With stamps that have a high postage value relative to cost, hinging doesn't matter at all as you can apply a hinged stamp to an envelope as readily as a never hinged one.

Sales Tax

2011-12-27T07:55:00.000-05:00

2012 may be the year when the sales tax exemption that most philatelists enjoy when they add stamps to their collections ends. The current sales tax code in most states does not formally exempt postage stamps from sales tax but rather exempts sales of products that travel across state lines when the merchant lacks a physical presence in the state that he is selling (which is how most stamps are sold). This exemption has fueled the growth of mail order selling and now Internet selling and has been actively opposed by most states who are desperate for revenue. The reason for current mail order sales tax exemption is that under our Constitution only the Federal government has the right to regulate interstate commerce and so mail order sales from one state to the next fall under the bailiwick of Congress to regulate and tax. But under pressure from the states, Congress may well act next year.
The bill that is currently the front runner will allow states to levy sales taxes on interstate sales if they agree to streamline their sales tax codes. Currently there are thousands of different exemptions and tax rates by state, county and often even smaller municipalities. The difficulty of a business say in Jenkintown, calculating, collecting and remitting thousands of different taxes has long been a critical argument against modifying the status quo. In exchange for the streamlining, companies with out of state sales of over half a million dollars will be required to charge and collect sales tax and remit it to each state. If this bill passes it will add to your cost of your stamps if you are a collector. If you are a dealer it will add to costs of doing business. Collecting the tax demands a high level of computerization and the use of an outside service, like a payroll service, to administer your sales taxes. It will very troublesome to small businesses. I write about this now as 2012 is an election year, and one that is set to be unusually contentious. In election cycles like this one candidates are unusually receptive to constituent concerns. If this change is something that you don't want it would be wise to follow the issue as the year progresses and contact your senator and representatives.

2011

2011-12-26T06:00:00.000-05:00

The philatelic market has always had four quite different aspects. There has been the entry level market which consists of lower priced stamps, mint US postage type material, approvals and the like. This appeals to and is geared towards newer collectors, younger collectors or collectors of modest means. There is the high end market which is comprised of rarish and more expensive stamps and covers which I usually (and rather arbitrarily) define as stamps selling from $250-$1000 per stamp or set. There is the rarity market, stamps above a thousand dollars each but really more the $5000 and above market. And there is the mid market, stamps in the $10-$250 range. This year the stamp market has performed quite unlike I remember before. First, the lower end market was weak, postage type material was soft and lower prices sets were very hard to find dealer buyers for. This indicates that sales of material at this end of the market were languishing. This is probably a reflection of the recession with high unemployment and lower incomes keeping newcomers away from new hobbies. It is also a reflection of philately's continued difficulties in attracting younger collectors. And the rarity market was very soft too. The auctioneers at the highest end of the market had lower and sometimes much lower sales as buyers dried up and well heeled collectors were reluctant to offer their stamps during the Great Recession. There was a real dearth a great "name" sales this year. But though the higher and lower end of the stamp market were weak, the two main mid range areas-stamps selling between $20-1000 was overall quite good. We saw a lot of activity and not just for the highest quality ( When you see strength in lower quality stamps it is an indication of overall strength and breadth in the stamp market). The reason for this strength in the mid range of the stamp market has three main factors. First, in this recession the wealthiest collectors have moved down market, still buying stamps but filling in some of the less expensive stamps that they need. Second, there have been many newcomers to our hobby and they are largely the predicted influx of baby boomers returning to philately. These collectors already have their old collections with many of the lower priced stamps and when they reenter the hobby they immediately begin pursuing mid range and upper range items. And the third reason why better stamps have done well is that this recession has largely hit less educated previously middle class Americans. Professionals and upper middle class workers have not lost their jobs in anywhere near the numbers that poorer people have. And with good jobs and declining real expenses now that their houses are paid off (or nearly so) and their kids are off their payroll these people have money and time to devote to their hobby.

Why We Collect

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

The desire to collect is innate and probably relates to the gatherer instinct that humans share with 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, most stamp collectors were introduced to the hobby by a relative or friend and the feeling one has about philately gets infused with the feelings one has about the early sharing of your hobby with that important person in your life. Second, one can collect at a pretty high level over a period of years and yet store the entire collection on a couple of shelves. Some other hobbies have this advantage, but few have it as clearly as stamps. Most collectibles are far larger and harder to store than stamps. A philatelic collection of thousands can be kept in one album whereas a collection of a thousand horseshoes takes up a garage. This means that a stamp collection can easily be retained during periods of disinterest (which happens with all hobbies) to be picked up again at a high level when interest returns. And third, orderliness relates to both comprehensiveness and cleanliness. Few other hobbies have catalogs and none are as detailed as stamp catalogs. Knowing what you need is appealing to collectors. And, despite what our spouses say to the contrary, philately is clean and neat compared to most collecting hobbies and fits in well with modern living situations. After all you don't collect classic meerschaum pipes. Just think how wise you were when you decided to collect stamps. You found a hobby that is neat and clean, takes up little room and can be put away for years to be returned to easily and at the same high level from which you enjoyed it before.

Philatelic Economics

2011-12-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

A remarkable aspect of philately is that unpopularity breeds further unpopularity. It is truly unusual to see a good collection of nearly any South and Central American country. Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Cuba are exceptions, but for the other twenty or so countries that make up rest of the southern Americas, collections that are even 75% complete for major Scott numbers are quite rare. The reason is financial but not in the way you might think. Take Ecuador, for instance. It is a country that is just below average in per capita income but with a large middle and upper middle class and several large cities (philatelic popularity is related to rates of urbanization). There are few real rarities by price among its stamps. Its issuing policy is conservative and appropriate. It should have a decent number of domestic collectors as well as an active expatriate collecting community and yet I can't remember the last time I've see a mostly complete Ecuador collection. The same is true of most Latin American countries and when you move away from major Scott numbers to the thousands of minor varieties that Scott lists, then the number of comprehensive collections moves from small to virtually nonexistent. The reason for the lack of good collections of these areas is not lack of native collectors, though that is contributory. It is simply a lack of material. More collectors couldn't collect Uruguay or Bolivia even if they wanted to. The material simply isn't available in sufficient quantities for it to be offered enough for collectors to want it. On EBay today there were less than a thousand Ecuadorian stamp items offered (and most of those were covers, odd ball items or missorted lots from other areas) compared with 441,000 US stamp lots. That's 2/10 of a percent as many. There are hundreds of lesser priced varieties that are listed in Scott that I have never seen offered-ever- in a lifetime as a professional in this hobby. Philately became popular in Europe in the 1860s and 1870s when there came to be enough collectible material for dealers to begin to promote it. Latin American philately has always suffered from such a dearth of material that collectors have found the pursuit not worth the effort.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-23T17:40:00.000-05:00

We want to thank the thousands of Apfelbaum clients who have made this year our most successful ever. Over ten thousand of you are registered to buy from us online and last year we sold over 25,000 lots. Going forward we continue to promise you a guarantee that is without equal in the philatelic world-complete 100% money back satisfaction and a life time guarantee that every item we sell is genuine and as described. Thanks again and we wish you a healthy and happy holiday season and good wishes to you and your family for the coming year. By the way, if there are any topics that you would like to see me write about in these blog articles, let me know.

Who Died This year who Should be Commemorated on a Postage Stamp

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

The USPS announced this year that they were going to begin to waive the" ten year deceased" rule for commemoration on US postage stamps. Looking at the list of notable deaths of 2011, I don't think we need to worry that we are going to be inundated by a massive amount of new issues. It seems that there are just not that many people that the USPS would consider putting on a stamp anyway. Remember, many of the most significant deaths are hardly people we are about to see on our stamps. Vaclav Havel(the Czech writer and Prime Minister and one of the leaders in the demise of the Iron Curtain) is deservedly famous but it is highly unusual to see foreign heads of state on our stamps. Kim Jing-Il is important too, but unless the USPS is planning a Favorite Despots series I don't think he will be on a United States stamp anytime soon. The Boston Globe lists the 85 most significant deaths of the last yearhttp://www.boston.com/news/obituaries/notable_deaths_of_2011?pg=85 and of that number nationality and esoterica eliminate all but Betty Ford, Steve Jobs, Joe Frazier, Henry Morgan, Harmon Killebrew, Liz Taylor and Jane Russell. Only Liz is a definite for ten years from now and only she would have been pictured on a stamp as a living person. So I think the worry that picturing current people on stamps will create problems is misplaced. The real problem is that after nearly 2000 commemorative issues, there are not enough new persons deserving to be on United States postage stamps at all.

December 21 and 9/11

2011-12-22T06:00:00.002-05:00

The United States Post Office has commemorated everything from baseball to rock stars, from Faulkner to Disney. We do really well at honoring our heroes and often at overvaluing the trivial. But as a nation we aren't very comfortable with commemorating or honoring our painful experiences. Our philatelic commemoration of the most painful American experience, the Civil War, has been spotty, more a selection of famous battles than addressing the causes of the war and how ending the evil of slavery was played out. The shameful end of Reconstruction has never made it to stamps nor has Jim Crow or lynching or the nearly century long attempt to continue de facto slavery. We are not very good as a society at facing what is painful without jingoistic posturing. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the two terrorist attacks on America that have occurred in the last twenty-five years have been ignored. On December 21, 1988 Pan Am 103 was blown up over Locherbie Scotland and on September 11, 2001 a variety of attacks on New York and Washington killed thousands. And yet even ten years after the last attack there has been no attempt to honor these victims of terrorism. Sure it would be painful, but our postal policy should not just be about Homer Simpson, quilts and flowers.

Five Hundredth Posting

2011-12-21T05:49:00.000-05:00

When I began this blog a couple a years ago the purpose was to tell a few stories about our hobby, to talk about the way the hobby used to be and identify some of the the changes that have occurred in Philately. Little did I think that within two short years there would be 500 topics to explore and that this number would only scratch the surface of subjects that our vast hobby affords. Philatelic writing has three main strains. There is writing in the tradition of Herman Herst Jr and Earl Apfelbaum, writing that tells the history of our hobby and the personalities who have collected and dealt stamps. There is writing in the tradition of the Collector's Club Philatelist and the Journal of the London Philatelic Society (now the Royal) that treats our hobby as a serious academic discipline. And there is writing in the tradition of Linns and the American Philatelist, informative but not exhaustive-an overview of many subjects so that the reader can further investigate subjects he finds interesting. As this blog has progressed I have tried to do all three of these types of writing and have been amazed at how many topics there still are to write about. As I write my five hundredth article, thanks for reading. Over 900 readers a month enjoy these articles and it is growing by about a hundred readers a month. Since philatelic writing is usually more informative than timely it doesn't get dated so if you go back and read some of the older posts sometime, I think you'll like them.

South Korea

2011-12-20T07:44:00.000-05:00

Especially scary about the death of North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Il is the effect it will have on South Korea. When the Koreas were partitioned in the early post WW II period, they were both equally devastated. But while North Korea has gone from poor to destitute, South Korea has been the poster child for capitalism, ending last year as the world's 26th wealthiest country (on a per capita income basis) wedged between Japan and Spain. The question for philatelists is why, given that the Koreans have become so wealthy, are their stamps are not more avidly collected and why haven't they appreciated in value anywhere nearly as rapidly as the stamps of China and India. After all, Korea has a large population that is wealthy and well educated. Philatelic proclivity is always subsumed to national character. Qatar is the wealthiest country in the world on a per captita basis yet little of their philatelic demand is from native Qataris. Philately is not a hobby that has caught the interest of Middle Easterners. So while we can never know for sure what the reason is for the relative disinterest of Koreans for their stamps compared to some other Asian countries, here is what we do know. Korean stamps have not increased much in price over the last twenty years especially compared to Chinese stamps. Very rare Korean items which would sell for many thousands of dollars if they were Chinese stamps sell for only hundreds. I think the reason are more economic than cultural. I think the citizens of mainland China are expressing their lack of faith in the Communist oligarchy that rules their country when they bid up the price of their stamps. Philately has tended to be popular in countries that have a history of difficulties with fiat currency, inflation and devaluations and I think the interest in Koreans in their stamps is genuine philatelic interest whereas the interest in the Chinese has more of hedging quality to it. This means that the price of Korean stamps will rise more slowly but more steadily whereas the price of Chinese stamps could well be subject to a bust.

Dear Leader

2011-12-19T07:47:00.004-05:00

Kim Jong-Il has died. As leader of North Korea, he presided over his nation's continued slide into abject poverty and oppression. There are few laboratory tests in any environment that can so measure the differences in political systems as did North and South Korea. Divided after complete devastation during WW II, the North took a Maoist and Stalinist central planning model and the South a capitalist American model. The results have been so dramatic that if this were a medical study it would have been called off for ethical reasons. The South has prospered and become one of the wealthier nations in the world whereas the North has gotten to the point where most of the 24 million people who live there are starving and would die without massive food aid. Over the next few years succession issues should affect North Korea. Kim Jong-Il's heir is a twenty-eight year old boy, who has been educated in the west. Whether he will have any real power or whether he will move North Korea to a capitalist democratic model is unknown. Indeed, it is even unknown whether North Korea's leaders will move towards war with the south which, if this morning's moves on the Korea and Tokyo stock exchanges are any indication, many consider a real possibility. As far as stamps are concerned, North Korea has been a prolific issuer. Philatelists are always looking for the next China-a country whose stamps had been plentiful and where internal economic success leads to a huge increase in stamp collecting and great financial gain to the early holders of those stamps. India has conformed to such a model with its stamps rising smartly. North Korea will not join this list. It's economy is not small-it is minuscule. The people are not poor-they are destitute. Add poorly educated to the list and it would take decades of rapid economic growth to even move North Korea to the levels of a developing country. So save your money. If North Korean stamps ever begin to increase in price you will have a long warning period in which to buy them.

Quality, Quality, Quality

2011-12-18T07:19:00.000-05:00

For many years in the property market is has been said that there are three things that influence prices and will insure investors a good return-location, location, location. Similarly, the unstated emphasis in stamp investment has been quality with the suggestion that only the finest examples of each stamp will be a good investment. This current recession has proven that belief wrong in the stamp world. Here is what has happened. In the early years of this decade high quality graded certified material saw a great run up in price. The fetishization of common stamps in "100" graded condition was ridiculous and many common stamps sold for hundreds of times what any sane collector would pay for them. This market has completely collapsed, mainly because few collectors were involved in it in the first place. That market was driven by a west coast philatelic expertization service that liked the fees it was getting expertizing for grade and by a few dealers and coin transplants who knew little about our hobby and cared less. No one mourns the passing of this aspect of quality driven collecting. More importantly though, the interest in highest quality scarcer stamps has fallen off during this recession at the same time that interest in stamps in general has remained high. Truth told, interest in Philately is strong as aging baby boomers are returning to the hobby of their youth. But these new collectors are very happy with stamps in the quality grades they aspired to get when they were younger and are very satisfied with Very Fine. We have seen the market at the top end be very weak the last few years while there has been considerable strength at the higher mid levels. Whether the highest quality will again find favor if this recession ever ends is a good question. Personally I hoped things stay as they are. My own view is that stamp collecting is a great hobby but that it loses much of it's appeal when the quality of the stamp is more important than the stamp itself.

Gum and Printing

2011-12-17T07:31:00.000-05:00

Gum has had a long relationship with printing on postage stamps. In the pre 1930s days, flat press printing meant that sheets of paper were fed into the press one by one and then the printed sheets were hung up to dry, gummed and weighted at the corners so that as the gum contracted the stamp sheets did not curl. With the faster and more efficient printing method of rotary press, stamps were printed on rolls of paper. Hand gumming was impossible as was weighting each sheet to prevent shrinkage. The solution was to apply the gum to the sheet with ridges, sort of like expansion lines on freshly poured concrete sidewalks, which allowed a small amount of contraction of the paper from the drying gum without curling. Gum ridges were the solution used by the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Different countries had different answers to this problem. The German printing office applied their gum in a sprayed ridged pattern against the curl of the paper- an high tech and very effective solution, but one which makes pre 1960 German stamps very difficult to convincingly regum. The British Crown Agents printers didn't bother doing anything about the curling problem and this is why even today if you leave a set of mint George V from any colony on your stamp desk overnight you come back in the morning to a tightly curled mess. The problem in general became moot about 1960 when technological advances in printing allowed stamps to be printed on rolls of pregummed paper in which the shrinkage from the gum had already occurred and been accounted for. But as collectors go back and collect earlier stamps it is important to be aware of how earlier technology affects the stamps they are acquiring.

What Happened to H E Harris

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

Those of us who started in philately over thirty years ago remember H E Harris. Harris was the largest stamp dealer in the mid twentieth century, growing rapidly during the Great Depression with the Captain Tim radio show. Harris was a leading promoter of philately with album publishing and approvals so that by 1975 Harris had tens of thousands of customers and, it was argued, made more new collectors than the Post Office itself. By 1975 Henry Harris was an old man and was ready to sell his business and the story of the demise of Harris tells us a lot about American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Harris sold his business to General Mills and as a young stamp dealer I had visions of General Mills promoting stamp collecting on the back of every box of Cheerios sold in America. But this was not to be. General Mills ran a late twentieth century venture capitalism division and it was this unit that bought Harris. Their goal was simple. They stripped Harris of its assets, sold off the inventory, floated the publishing division and closed down the approval business. Employment went from hundreds to zero. The employees lost out, stamp collectors lost out, everyone lost except General Mills which made far more money dismantling Harris than Harris ever made keeping his company in business and his employees and collectors happy. (The model that General Mills used was the venture capital model of the time and was the same model that was used to enrich venture capitalists at places like Bain Capital). Now don't get me wrong. I am a capitalist-all stamp dealers are. But the rewards that the purveyors of what they euphemistically call "creative destruction" get seem far out of proportion to the harm that they cause. I know this story well because the same team from General Mills that bought Harris made an offer for my company in 1981. But by then it was clear what the pattern was to be. We decided to stay as stamp dealers because we felt a commitment to our staff, our customers and to our hobby and because of our fear that after they dismantled our company we would have nothing left to do.

Changes in Certification Standards

2011-12-15T07:48:00.000-05:00

The first American Philatelic Society certificate was issued a bit over a hundred years ago and it was for a US Occupation of Cuba issue. Following the standards of the time the certificate simply said that the stamp was genuine. The first certificates took their role as "certificates of genuineness" seriously. They said nothing about the quality of the stamps, often not even mentioning if the gum was genuine or not and they certainly never graded the stamps. By about 1930 it was common to see the issue of gum addressed on Philatelic Foundation certificates, though this practice was not mandatory and many regummed stamps were passed as og. About this time too, certificates began to address the issue of quality with major repairs being mentioned for the first time. It wasn't until the late 1980's that hinging became a matter to be passed on by experts and the first NH certificate were issued by the Philatelic Foundation in the late 1980s. The greatest changes in stamp certificate history began with the creation of the Professional Stamp Expertisers certificate about twenty years ago. This for profit organization began as an offshoot of a coin expertising group that had a made a fortune in the coin grading certificate craze and began to issue graded certificates that made a big point of mentioning every imperfection on the stamp. Graded certificates burned themselves out a few years ago with huge premiums being paid for common stamps in perfect condition. Many unknowlegeable collectors and dealers bought these stamps at prices that look ludicrously high only a few years later. The evolution in stamp certification has been a slow change of emphasis from genuineness to quality.

United Nations

2011-12-14T06:07:00.000-05:00

Postally speaking, the United Nations is an invention- an organization not a nation or political entity. The fact that it issues its own postage stamps and maintains its own postal service is a concession to the trappings of sovereignty (real political entities control their own post) and a revenue grab (UN stamps can be sold to collectors and the United States has the expense of processing and delivering the United Nations Postal Administration's (UNPA) mail). Interest in UN stamps has always been a factor of interest in and respect for the United Nations as an organization and it is safe to say that interest in UN stamps are at an all time low. The first UN issues were issued in 1948 and were avidly collected, largely by Americans. For the first twenty years of UN issues many US collectors maintained a collection of UN. It was cheap and they could complete it. After the UN began taking an anti US and anti Israel line, beginning about 1970, UN philately increasingly fell out of favor. Three things have contributed to UN's continued decline in collector interest. First, collectors have been put off by the fact that now three UN postal agencies-New York, Geneva and Vienna-all issue stamps, making far too many issues for the legitimate postal needs of the UN. Second, the UNPA has continued to increase restrictions on the use of their stamps on mail (thus lowering the value of older postage type material). Originally, postal patrons could mail what they wanted from the UN. Now the post office only accepts smaller quantities of mail with difficult restrictions as to use. This has led to a steep decline in the value of older UN stamps to where it is hard to sell UN at 20% of the postage value. Collectors don't want to put their money into a collection that depreciates like this. And third, the investment scandal company Afinsa was gearing up to begin promoting UN before it was closed down by the Spanish government leaving a market overhang of millions of dollars of UN stamps further depressing prices. It seems unlikely that the stamps of the United Nations will ever regain the popularity they once had.

Danzig

2011-12-13T09:30:00.002-05:00

One of the most interesting philatelic areas is Danzig, now called Gedansk. Danzig is a city or rather city state on the shores of the Baltic Sea between Germany and Poland (which was long ruled by Russia) and part of its philatelic charm is in the many issues that were created as political control bounced back between various outside nations. For most of the early stamp period, Danzig was part of Germany and used German postage stamps-first the stamps of Prussia, of which it was a part, and then after 1871 and German unification, using the stamps of Germany. After 1920 and the Treaty of Versailles, Danzig was stripped from Germany and became a free city and as such issued its own postage stamps. It is during this period that most collectors know Danzig as the country created several hundred stamp issues. The stamps are for the most part easily obtained in mint condition but the challenge is finding many of the issues in legitimately used condition and in finding the hundreds of varieties that Scott and Michel list for these stamps. Most of the varieties are modest in price compared with their rarity though they are not easy (but not impossible) to find. After 1939 and the German invasion of Poland, Danzig became part of Nazi Germany and Danzig stamps became moot. Germany maintained control until the end of WW II when Danzig was stripped from Germany and became a city of Poland. It is one of the cities that was most supportive of the Polish Solidarity movement over twenty years ago and it is ironic that the territory that the Soviet Union had insisted be stripped from Germany so as to weaken it in the post war period would then prove to be one of the factors in the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a few hundred dollars you can buy all but a few of the Scott listed stamps of Danzig and specialty items can keep you busy forever.

End Of The Year Buy It Now sale

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

We have listed today our end of the year direct sale. In it are over 5000 lots available for your collection at the click of your mouse. There are lots of United States stamps, British Commonwealth including Canada and extensive General Foreign including collections and accumulations. Nearly $2 million dollars of sales value is included here with prices up to 40% off what the stamps were originally listed for. And of course each lot comes with Apfelbaum's full quality and condition guarantee and satisfaction guarantee. You should take a look at what is being offered.

The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date

2011-12-12T09:15:00.001-05:00

The Lone Wolf was a detective series in the 1920's about a high end burglar named Michael Lanyard who helped the police solve crimes. The series was written by Louis Joseph Vance and was made into about twenty movies in the 1930's. I happened to see one recently on TCM entitled The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date. The plot is a twisted kidnapping but a key part of the story is that the Lone Wolf-a cool debonair urbane sophisticated lady killer and international jewel thief and crime solver- is a stamp collector. In the first scene he buys what appears to be a Cuba #244a, an inverted center (though the denomination was difficult to see and the movie was in black and white) which is represented as the great rarity that the Lone Wolf needs for his very extensive stamp collection (though the invert today catalogs only $650, so philatelic license was taken as to rarity). The collection is then stolen from the Lone Wolf who must solve the kidnapping in order to get his collection back. The stamps are a side plot but the fact that someone like the Lone Wolf could plausibly be portrayed as a serious philatelist tells much about how philately was viewed then and how it is viewed now. The Lone Wolf-Michael Lanyard-was the hero of eight books and nearly twenty movies having such love interests as Ida Lupino and Rita Hayworth. How times have changed. Can you imagine a Brad Pitt character being a serious stamp collector or Bradley Cooper? Part of what attracts people to a hobby is the image it projects. Philately's image has become far more cerebral and far less cool.

Check Your Albums

2011-12-11T10:00:00.001-05:00

Linn's is reporting this week that a collector in Sweden bought a cheap world wide collection at an auction and there was a rare syllabic character (plate number) on a 6 sen 1875 Cherry Blossom issue-rare to the tune of being worth perhaps $200,000 on a stamp that is otherwise only a few dollars. This is an extreme example of diligence and luck but there are many varieties and errors that do turn up from time to time misidentified in general collections and which can mean big finds for the average knowledgeable philatelist. Here is a few hints on what you need to know. Know the various types of the one cent and ten cent 1851-57 US. There are six main types of the one cent and four main types of the ten cent. The stamps all look very similar but can vary in price from $5-$30,000. I once found a rare 10c type mint in a cheap European made US collection that was worth $30,000 but I once missed a rare 1c type which someone later found in one of our lots that was also worth $30,000. Know the grills and on what stamps the better ones are known and always be on the look out for the rare Z grill. On Large Queen Canadian stamps check the paper of the one cent. If it is laid you have a rarity. On George VI British Commonwealth watch the perf types. Many better stamps have Scott "a" numbers and are overlooked. GB stamps of the Nineteenth Century are often used abroad and can be told by the cancellation numbers. If the cancel number starts with a letter it was probably used in a foreign post office. The Scott specialized world wide catalog lists most of these. Scott doesn't list similar cancels on France but if you have numeral cancels in the 5000's you should check them. Actually, there are few earlier stamps on which significant varieties don't exist. What would be fun to do is get an inexpensive worldwide collection from an auction (say, an Apfelbaum Auction) and get the American Philatelic Research library to send you a batch of foreign specialized catalogs and go through the lot and see how real specialists collect the stamps of each country. Even lifelong philatelists continue to be amazed at how vast this hobby is.

The Endowment Effect

2011-12-10T10:00:00.003-05:00

The Endowment Effect is a concept in behavioral economics which states that people tend to increase their idea of the value of an item depending on whether or not they are the owner. The Endowment Effect was first hypothesized by the economist Richard Thaler and is an example of a big name for an idea that has been pretty obvious to stamp collectors and stamp dealers for many years. Apfelbaum engages to buy about 500 collection per year. These are collections from collectors who have contacted us to sell their stamps. For the most part they are the collectors who made the stamp collections so they are well versed with the quality and popularity of the material that they own and are aware of the prices that they paid for their stamps. They are, too, aware that stamp dealers have expenses and profits to make and that markups on philatelic material run a third or more. And most collectors have a modest Endowment Effect-they like their stamps and believe they have made many wise purchases over time. It is not unusual (and it is probably healthy) for collectors to have a 20-30% overestimation due to the Endowment Effect factor. But a few collectors-we call them the well endowed- have a crazy relationship with their stamps. They believe that their stamps are worth far more than they are really worth (generally simply for the reason that they are their stamps) and can in no way be persuaded otherwise. These are the same people who live in homes that have not gone down in value during the current recession.

Cover Collecting

2011-12-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

Stamps were collected from 1840 onwards and within a few decades specialized collectors were trying to get their favorite stamps used on cover as well as off cover. But the earliest collectors collected both their stamps and covers only by country and it was not until about 1920 that the first thematic cover collectors came into being. They did not think of themselves as thematic collectors and today their descendants would recoil at the idea that they are in any way related to Topical collectors. But the fact remains that, at its core, Postal History collecting is thematic collecting. Pick a Postal History specialty -say transatlantic Mail or Civil War- and its core is an emphasis of the non-philatelic story being told rather than the stamps and covers themselves. Philately developed as a picturesque assemblage of the stamps and covers of a particular stamp issuing entity at a particular era in time, whereas thematic collecting uses stamps and covers to tell a non-philatelic story about the topic itself. In this sense it has always surprised me that traditional philately has endured as the main way philatelists collect.Thematic collecting allows more creativity and individuality, as the diversity of material available to themistmatists is vast and the story can be told so many different ways. Traditional philately is more circumscribed which is probably what its adherents want. Perhaps the reason philately has thrived is that the two main branches of our hobby offer either structure or creativity (or whatever balance the collector wishes thereof)

The Cost Of US New Issues

2011-12-08T07:36:00.001-05:00

Hard as this is to believe, throughout the 1950's the United States Post Office issued an average of ten stamps per year with a total face value of 30c. Last year there were over 150 issues with a $77 face value. When one is tallying up where collector dollars get spent it is hard to avoid wondering what would happen to the price of older stamps if the USPS (and foreign Post Offices, which are usually not much better, and often much worse) had issuing policies that were more conservative. Over the last twenty years the United States has issued over 3500 different stamps with a combined face value of over $1700. And since most of these stamps are marketed in sheets of twenty a devoted collector could easily have spent $30,000 or more over the last two decades on his collection with the post office on new issues alone. Put this kind of money into quality United States stamps and you would produce a collection of real value. In US philately $30,000 buys used Nineteenth Century complete (except for the better grills, reissues and Special Printings),Twentieth Century complete mint (except for the rare Washington Franklin coils and types), Airmails including Zeppelins and decent other back of the book. In other words $30k can get you a pretty nice US collection which would have increased in value over the last twenty years and would stand a pretty good chance of doing well in the future. The $30,000 in postage that many people have bought now sells for about 65% of face value and will trickle down in value as postage rate increases make these stamps harder to use in coming years. The problem with philatelic prices is not inadequate demand. The problem is that traditional stamp dealers compete with an aggressive marketer of modern postal labels. That marketer has a huge promotion budget and thousands of retail outlets. Many people stop buying new issues at a certain point in their collecting lives. They would be better off if they reach that point sooner rather than later.

USPS Safety, Reliability and Attitude

2011-12-07T08:39:00.001-05:00

A few years ago I read an article about how smaller town diamond merchants send their stock to each other by ordinary First Class mail. The article said that outside New York the incidence of First Class mail going astray is nearly nonexistent. Apfelbaum's send out thousands of packages per year, mostly through the postal service, with almost never a loss. Companies send their valuable packages out Registered or confirmed delivery largely so as to protect themselves from dishonest recipients or door men who would pretend that the package didn't arrive, rather than because of Postal Service concerns. Think about it. When was the last time you sent a bill or birthday card that didn't arrive. The reason that virtually all First Class letters reach their destination is that we have an honest, professional and relatively well paid group of men and women working for the USPS. And the pension system that so many Congressman complain about helps too. Only a fool with vested years in the Postal Service retirement plan would risk his future for a few First Class letters. Postal employees are very honest and most of them, like you and me, are usually pleasant as well. Sure, they have their bad days like the rest of us. But what I find interesting is this: When I am in a good mood, slept well and feeling that the world is a pretty OK place to be, I invariably find kind, considerate and decent Postal Clerks. But on those days when I'm in a sour mood so too are the Postal Clerks, my family and all the other people I deal with.

Post Office plan to Slow Mail Delivery

2011-12-06T08:24:00.004-05:00

Its hard to believe that the post office's troubles are as bad as some are saying when a simple two part solution can fix so many money issues. The Post Office announced that it is closing half of the main sorting facilities that it operates and that this will save the Post Office $6.5 billion per year. That's a lot of money. And the result is that instead of postal delivery for first class mail coming on average of two days in the postal stream it will come more like two to three. In years gone by, perhaps sensitivity to quick delivery influenced some users but today anything that is truly time sensitive is emailed or onernighted. As an additional savings, the Post Office is planning to eliminate Saturday delivery, a communication delivery service anachronism, which will save billions more. USPS accounting, like most multi billion dollar companies, is opaque and it is difficult for outsiders to penetrate into the inner workings of the organization and the cost of various components of service and goods that the organization offers. But if slowing First Class mail delivery by a day and ending Saturday delivery can save over $10 billion per year, it was foolish not to have done it long ago.

Stamp Theft

2011-12-05T08:10:00.009-05:00

Stamp theft, despite the scare stories that you sometimes hear, is really not much of a problem. We rarely have a customer inform us that his stamps were stolen and the APS's stamp theft committee almost never sends out an advisory of a stolen collection. In the 1970's stamp theft was more of an issue than it is now and the change from stamps being an actively stolen commodity to an infrequently pilfered one tells us a lot about the changes in our hobby and our world in the last thirty years. The reason for the change is threefold. First, stamps have languished in value so that on a weight to value ratio (or "value to difficulty of fencing ratio") they are an inefficient product to steal. High end TVs, computers and jewelry have made much more appealing targets over the last thirty years and stamps that are stolen are often taken as an afterthought of another robbery. Second, most criminals like the easy and big money and that money is in drugs. One could make the case that the only good byproduct of the drug war is that by attracting the criminal element with the rich allure of drugs we have kept most other types of property safe from the small percentage of people who prefer crime to work. And lastly, the Internet has made images of most stamps that you have bought in the last fifteen years a permanent part of the world record. This has dramatically reduced the sales value of stolen stamps because they can't be listed on the Internet as they would be recognized and a trail would lead back to the thieves. Still, you see stories of how careful you need to be about stamp theft. Most of this is just illusion. The APS insurance groups insures stamps against fire or theft for 0.3% of the declared value per year. That is $150 per year for a $50,000 stamp collection. For this they write and administer the policy, and insure against water, fire and theft (and make a profit). Based on these insurance rates its hard to believe that you have much to worry about with your stamps. You should still have insurance but also you can have peace of mind.

World Stamp Show 2016

2011-12-04T14:39:00.001-05:00

International stamp shows have long lead times. The announcements have already begun for the next US based International show which will be held in New York in 2016(http://www.ny2016.org/) International shows are held under the auspices of the FIP (Federation Intenational de Philatelie) a group that arranges international competitive exhibits and certifies stamp shows. The United States gets one show every ten years and they have been held on the sixes (the 1946 show was held in 1947 to honor the centennial of the first United States stamp and the 1996 show was similarly moved back a year because of the sesquicentennial of the same issue). Sipex was the international show held in 1966 in Washington and it was my first International. (Sipex has the honor of having the lowest value US souvenir sheet issued in its commemoration. It shows what a difference marketing is today to realize that the Post office issued a souvenir sheet with a face value of only 5c to mark that show). The 2016 show will be at the Javitz Center in New York and should be a real event. The stamps one can see at such an exhibit are astounding and I know its a long way off but try and stay healthy and plan to go.

Original Gum

2011-12-04T07:00:00.005-05:00

There is no more valuable substance in the world by weight and volume than original gum. Consider -the gum on a thousand mint US Ten Cent 1847s if miraculously removed, commingled and weighed would total about an ounce. And the value of such gum on the stamps is $12,500 for each stamp according to the latest Scott catalog (the difference between an" og" price and a "no gum" price) which makes our magic ounce of og worth a cool $125 million (a US #31 has a $20000 premium for og making a thousand of them worth $200 million.) And og is increasing rapidly in value. The price of Nineteenth Century stamps with original gum has far outstripped the price of the same stamps without gum over the last twenty years. And this is for a substance that is invisible when you mount your stamps and requires the utmost care so as not to compromise or damage. And that is when you are fortunate enough to have bought og in the first place. I can't tell you how many certificates from ten or more years ago I have seen reversed as to og and what buyers had bought as og is not now considered og. And don't think that this won't happen again in the future. The emphasis on gum seems silly and even dangerous to our hobby.

Chicken

2011-12-03T07:00:00.003-05:00

Increasingly, the political calculus seems to be the game of chicken. In the US debt extension negotiations in Congress this summer the idea of compromise was considered unacceptable, largely by the Republicans. In the European debt crisis going on now, the Germans have taken the same position. The idea that intransigence is a smart political strategy is a foolish one. Sometimes it works but when it breaks down the unintended consequences are terrible. Philatelists know the devastating effects of WW I from our hobby and postal history- the Occupation issues and locals and regionals that were created as governments fought for territory and order. But what is often unseen in philately is human suffering. The consensus of historians is that WW I was caused by a colossal game of chicken. After the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand, central European countries each felt that the others would back down in the face of military mobilizations. It didn't happen that way. Over fifteen million people, most of them young men, died in that war. And since WW II was just a continuation of WW I add another sixty million killed to the total of a game of chicken gone wild. This is what is so scary about what is going on right now in Europe and the US. Many politicians seem unaware of the risks of not seriously negotiating problems. The "my way or the highway" mentality may work in small human circles but in the larger world it is a prescription for disaster. Philatelists have enough stamps and covers to collect without issues caused by political failure.

Euro effect on the Stamp Market

2011-12-02T05:54:00.001-05:00

The current Euro mess has seemed to have little impact so far on the stamp market. The Euro has fallen some 15% against the dollar and the financial system in Europe is in turmoil but prices for European stamps seem stable. There is little buying from the weaker European areas, countries like Italy and Spain which would see serious devaluations of whatever currency they moved to if the Euro failed. And we are seeing no increased selling by European stamp holders attempting to put their money in dollars pending a devaluation. My own sense is that most stamp collectors and dealers are like most other consumers and they are still divorced from the financial turmoil that is going on around them. What concerns money center banks and government financing really has little short term impact on what most of us do anymore. Maybe we have become anesthetized to bad news. Last summer we watched the travesty of the United States nearly defaulting on its debt because of Congressional intransigence. In the end, the players involved blinked and a solution appeared. A similar ending is probably what most people feel will happen in the Euro crisis. So many major financial players have skin in the game that a solution will be worked out in the end. How much that solution will cost and how much of that cost will trickle down to most stamp collectors is not yet known. But until we feel the cost, it is still business as usual for most collectors.

Post Office Marketing

2011-12-01T05:34:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's post (about a private delivery service that operates at Airport TSA checkpoints to allow passengers to send back to themselves items of value that they unintentionally brought to a plane and are to be tossed as not acceptable boarding material) got me thinking about what is the major cause of the Post Offices budgetary problems. Sure, the United States Post Office is a large, slow bureaucracy, but also it is prohibited by law from entering new markets and offering new services without Postal Commission permission. This is terribly cumbersome and inefficient, and lobbying and competing business special interest groups attempt to curtail any Post Office changes that might impact on their business. The USPS rarely capitalizes on its most competitive advantage. There is no other business that stops at virtually every address in the United States each day to make a delivery and an aggressive marketer could easily cash in on that fact. How about lottery tickets? Order them online, pay with your credit card or from a credit that is set up by a cash payment at the post office and the number of tickets you want can be delivered to your home the next day. This would work too for postal money orders and the Post Office could even operate as a postal bank as it does in many countries. Indeed, the Post Office could set itself up as a kind of Amazon for commonly used lighter weight items that could easily be delivered with your mail each day. There are scores of products and market niches that the USPS could exploit. When you constrain government, hem it in by rules and regulations so that all the profitable areas around the government agency are forbidden to the agency to compete in, and then complain that government can't compete profitably you are being disingenuous. Government certainly has problems and inefficiencies but the attitude by some that government is the root of all evil is wrong.

TSA Postal History

2011-11-30T07:00:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I spent some time with the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration, the government agency that operates under the Department of Homeland Security to make our air travel safer. TSA has a variety of hard to understand rules about what you can and cannot take through security when you fly on a commercial airliner. The rules often seem arbitrary and changeable though to give TSA the benefit of the doubt, they are probably responding to Intelligence intercepts alerting them to dangers that would be counterproductive to inform the public of. If you are like me though, you have brought to security "forbidden items" by accident which you have to toss away or, in the case of a bottle of fine champagne I had to toss recently, donate to the TSA party fund. Several years ago I had my favorite pair of stamp tongs in my briefcase, a pair that I had had for over twenty years and which had the exact right tension and fit for me as well as having been my pair through thousands of hours of work. I had forgotten to take them from my briefcase before a flight and I can tell you I almost cried when they were taken from me. On Sunday, as I came through the Charlotte airport I saw that a firm has addressed this problem and created a private mail service that will mail contraband from the security line to your home. Its not cheap but it would have saved my tongs. And it is just a modern example of how innovative firms use mail type services to address communication and transportation needs. The first that I can think of to do this in the stamp period was the Pony Express. And the modern service exists for the same reason- people willing to pay huge premiums for non-traditional mail service because the value of what they need to transport is, to them, enormous.

Apfelbaum's Corner

2011-11-29T07:00:00.001-05:00

For over thirty years, from 1965 to 1987, my Grandfather, Earl Apfelbaum published a weekly column in Linns Stamp News, called Apfelbaum's Corner. In the very first article he said that his model for the articles were a series of car columns that had run in the Philadelphia Bulletin in the 1930's and 1940's called Rolling Wheels, which were written by a local car dealer. Their purpose was not overtly commercial. Rather, the intent was to create what was really the world's first blog, an intent to entertain and educate and create customer loyalty by telling stories and writing about matters of interest to collectors. Earl rarely tried to sell anything in his articles. He told stories about his early days in the hobby and how collecting changed during his lifetime. At one time in the late 1970's collectors voted Apfelbaum's Corner as Linns magazine's most popular feature and Linns even offered my Grandfather the option of having the column run for free (which if you knew the management of Linns was quite an offer indeed). Earl didn't accept the offer because he wanted to be able to plug his company if he wanted to and he didn't want any editorial interference. In 1985, we published The Best Of Apfelbaum's Corner and distributed over 2500 copies at that time. Earl was in the forefront of many innovations. He innovated the self service mail shop and was a pioneer in mail bid sales. He died the same year that IBM marketed the 286 PC so he never saw the Internet. But his column was really a blog, and he used paid advertising space to promote our company by entertaining rather than straight selling.

"Black Friday" name originated by Martin Apfelbaum

2011-11-28T15:00:00.001-05:00

Here's something we didn't know http://www.examiner.com/american-history-in-national/black-friday-is-upon-us-but-where-did-it-start

Cyber Monday

2011-11-28T05:40:00.001-05:00

The Internet has become a huge sales tool and it is just a matter of time before online sales overtake walk in retail sales in gross volume. Some products, such as books and especially music, are already sold mainly on line and each year brings a higher proportion of sales in these fields away from brick and mortar businesses. Some industries, such as car sales seem like they will always resist the Internet as the point of sale device, but car and electronics salespeople say that most buyers seem to have done quite a bit of online homework before they come in. It's hard to remember that there was a stamp business before the Internet. Hundreds of retail stamp stores existed in major cities around the world and hundreds of stamp shows and bourses competed to bring collectors and dealers together. Now a few clicks of a mouse and literally millions of stamps are on offer instantaneously on the Internet from the comfort of your home or office. Apfelbaum is honoring cyber Monday by having a 40% off Buy it Now sale. As you are looking through the selection of philatelic items for sale remember that fifteen years ago online philatelic sales didn't even exist.

New Issues

2011-11-27T07:14:00.001-05:00

In the 1980's mint new issues from British Colonies and Western Europe were marketed extensively as good investments. The theory was that as the number of collectors rose the newer issues would rise in value similarly to the way that the issues of the 1950's had risen by 1980. What the people who bought and sold these new issue investment portfolios didn't realize was that the cause of the rise in price of the earlier material was because insufficient quantities of 1950's and earlier material had been saved and not that demand was so much greater and would continue to increase. The increase in price in 1950's material was not a demand pull increase but rather a supply push as, because of World War II most of Europe and Britain were unable to afford expensive new issues during the 1950's and were catching up in the 1970's and buying those issues then. The people who invested heavily in the 1970's new issues have done poorly. We just sold at Public Auction an investment portfolio from the new issue guru Jeffrey Needleman for which the owner paid over $1700 in 1983. It consisted of hundreds of then current British Commonwealth mint sets all still in post office fresh condition. It realized the owner less than $400. A thirty year treasury bond in 1983 was paying over 11% (its hard to remember that interest rates were once so high). If he had bought one of these, our investor would have seen his $1700 worth over $30,000. Bad investment! Ironically, because new issues of that period were such a terrible investment virtually no one bought any quantities of new issues in the 1990's and 2000's. These have gone up in price.

Wikipedia

2011-11-26T07:00:00.005-05:00

Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the Internet. Containing over 20 million encyclopedia style articles, Wikipedia has over 100,000 active contributors and is visited by tens of millions of readers each month. If you visit the "stamp collecting" and "philately" entries on Wikipedia you will see how cursory and elementary the articles are. For the most part the discussions of the origins of collecting or postal history or the various collecting paradigms that have been developed are good. But largely they never go quite far enough. They seem to be written by contributors with a good but not deep knowledge of their subject. Perhaps this is because most Wikipedia contributors tend to be younger, as you need to be quite computer literate to figure out how to contribute (and most expert philatelists are older). Too, contributors must provide references for every factual assertion and this is off putting to many who know things but don't want to go running to our reference sources to figure out where we know it from. After spending some time reading the Wikipedia entries on our hobby, it is clear that an enormous amount of work needs to be done to explain the history and depth of philately to the world at large and that this work has not yet been done. It would seem a worthy APS project to assemble a Wikipedia group devoted to enhancing the articles about our hobby on the world's encyclopedia. After all, Wikipedia is the entry portal through which enormous numbers of new collectors hear about our hobby. Well written, informative and enticing articles on Wikipedia can do far more to recruit new collectors than just about anything else the philatelic community can do.

No News is Not Good News

2011-11-25T07:00:00.004-05:00

One of the hardest jobs in the world probably has to be generating news articles for Linns stamp magazine or any of the other weekly philatelic news journals. Is there really enough news to fill 64 pages with stamp news every week? Probably not. But Linns could do a better job of trying. The November 14th issue has a headline article about die cuts missing from Scott #4478-82 and a sub lede of a German commemorative of a Berlin church. As you page through the magazine you see a number of newer issue news articles, none of which most collectors care about. Now I know that Linns is a news weekly and I know the difference between news and commentary but there really are not that many people interested in the type of news stories that Linns is producing. A far better concept would mix news and commentary (sort of a Time Magazine format) and encourage discussion and exploration of philatelic topics. And get more new writers and jazz up the writing a bit. Several of the columnists who write for Linns have done so since I was a child. Look, I know it is easy to sit on the sidelines and make suggestions (which is what I am doing). Linns has done a great job stemming the subscriber base loss that hit all specialty market text publications. And perhaps the long term writing is on the wall and the publishers are trying to maximize their profits by spending as little on editorial content as possible and maximizing ad revenues . But Linns is the only general circulation weekly philatelic publication and it is a shame they are not trying harder to make the magazines editorial content more interesting, germane and entertaining.

Thanksgiving Thematics

2011-11-24T07:25:00.002-05:00

As you sit around this Thanksgiving with family and friends waiting for the turkey dinner no doubt you have been wondering which American holidays are collected thematically and which aren't. There are five main work holidays in the United States-Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Presidents Day has probably the most number of thematic stamp collections with Lincoln Philately having a very long history in our hobby. Lincoln was on numerous stamps in the late Nineteenth century and on many more esoteric revenues as well. And because of his popularity as President you saw good collections of thematic Lincoln material even before topical collecting was it's own subset of philately. Memorial Day commemorates the end of the Civil War and Civil War Philately in one form or another is probably the first thematic collecting that existed. Independence Day has had no shortage of active philatelic followers with the American Revolution Bicentennial being marketed like crazy in the 1970's. And of course Christmas is a major world wide theme. But I don't think I have ever seen a topical collection relating to Thanksgiving. It isn't hard to imagine making one-start with pilgrim related issues, some Massachusetts postal history, a Native American issue or two ( Pocahontas was the first person commemorated on a stamp who went to a Thanksgiving celebration-she's on US #330). Perhaps the reason that Thanksgiving thematics are rarely collected speaks to the place that Thanksgiving has in American's hearts. It is neither a religious nor nationalistic holiday. It alone of all our holidays honors the American spirit, not what we've done but who we are. As you enjoy your Thanksgiving this year reflect how fortunate we all are that our ancestors left their countries of origin and came to America to create a new life for themselves, their families and their descendants.

United States Revenues

2011-11-23T06:06:00.000-05:00

The first issue revenues of the United States are some of the world's most attractive stamps and would be far more popular among US collectors if it wasn't for the perf, imperf, part perf problem. These stamps were issued to pay taxes on everything from bills of sale to stock and property transfers and the initial plan was to issue revenue stamps for each type of transaction. But from the first this proved impractical and any of these revenues could be used to pay any kind of tax (I've seen regular issues stamps too-specifically #65, 68 and 73- used on documents to pay taxes). In the rush to get these stamps to users at the start of the Civil War they were sent imperforate or sometimes part perforated though the intention all along was for the issues to be perforated just as the postage stamps of the time were. Here is the problem with this issue. All are known perfed and many were also issued imperf and/or part perf. In nearly all cases the perforated stamps are far cheaper than the imperf and part perf ones and its easy to see how a collector with a scissors could make the varieties that he needs from the perforated stamps. The earliest revenue collectors had access to great warehouses of documents and they saw which stamps were used before they soaked them for their collections. Because of this they knew what was perf and what was imperf and what was in between. Today you really don't know for sure unless you collect pairs to prove where the perforations were or weren't. Most stamp collectors love certainty. Every stamp has a catalog number and a place in his collection. Uncertainty creates unpopularity and first issue revenues despite their scarcity and appeal would be for more collected if their identification were more easily certain.

Philatelic Misnomers

2011-11-22T10:01:00.000-05:00

The world of philately is replete with euphemisms and misnomers. Some of them are deceptive. Most of them are silly. The American Philatelic Experization Service (the expert group of the APS) for many years marketed themselves under their acronym APES, never cognizant that in the competitive world of expertizing services one shouldn't voluntarily place oneself lower on the evolutionary tree. And perhaps the height of tastelessness is the euphemism "Closed Albums" for philatelic obituaries. I mean really! But this phraseology, though tacky, is harmless compared to the assault on language made by philatelists in minimizing faults and exaggerating quality. "Expertly Restored" is favored when the seller is attempting to foist off a repair as a genuine item. A repaired stamp is considered damaged and must be sold as such, usually at a great discount from the perfect price. But oddly, "restored" covers are acceptable in the postal history world with many of the best covers having had extensive repair work done on them. Its worth noting that until the post WW II period stamp collectors were much like cover collectors today and didn't care much whether a stamp was repaired or not providing the work was done carefully and expertly. Then fashion changed, and not only was stamp restoration looked on as a fault but as perhaps the worse fault of all. Prices for repaired stamps have fallen to just a few percent of the perfect price. I can almost hear the screams at exhibition halls if this collector preference about "expert restoration" were to start to extend to covers as well.

The Leaf Blower Index

2011-11-21T08:31:00.016-05:00

The value of most United States stamps have been falling over the last twenty years. And the CPI has been rising. Critics have claimed that the CPI overemphasizes increases in food, fuel and housing (until the last few years at least). We have not understood that price increases have been commodity driven and that many existing goods and non commodity goods have remained stable in price or even declined, just as stamps have. I refer of course to the economic metric known as the Lawn Blower Index ( the "LBI"), a personal index of prices and inflation which I compiled yesterday. Specifically, it was time to blow some leaves and clean out my garage yesterday and my gas powered leaf blower was broken. About twenty years ago I bought this low end gas blower for $149. Home Depot had one yesterday at $99 and it is about ten times easier to use, lighter and (they say) blows more leaves per gallon. A US #1 sold twenty years ago for about $200 and sells now for about $160. So the cost of a leaf blower has declined about 20% over twenty years on the LBI (My first leaf blower cost 75% of a #1 at the time and today cost 60% of a current #1 price). And that doesn't even account for the far better quality and ease of use of today's leaf blowers. The increase in the cost of living is real. Food does cost more. But many of the things that we buy are far cheaper and better than they were twenty years ago. And if many United States stamps still sell at the same or lower prices they did years ago, so do many of the other products that we buy. We should enjoy rather than worry about the affordability of stamps. After all, we can afford more of the stamps we want for a smaller portion of our income than was true twenty years ago.

"TEN" and The Frameline

2011-11-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

Confederate States regular issues consist of fourteen Scott issued stamps that were issued over a period of four years during which the Civil War was fought. There are only two scarce stamps and both of these issues occurred when the Confederate States Post Office decided to change issues in 1863 . The new stamps were originally printed with the denomination in letters rather than in numerals. The history of having the denomination of stamps written in letters rather than numerals is one of generally short issues and low press runs. Postal workers hate them. Post office work has always combined high volume with stress and monotony which can be an unpleasant combination. Not being able to readily determine the denomination on the stamps on the envelopes presented to them slows postal workers down. It was for this reason that the denomination was changed to numerals and the TEN variety had a short press run. The "Frameline" varieties were varieties where framelines were drawn between the stamps as an aid to cutting the stamps apart evenly. But this was an example of a solution in search of a problem. No one had any difficulty cutting between the margins of the unframelined stamps ( people had far more trouble separating them when the lines were drawn). Postal patrons didn't like the stamps and they were withdrawn quickly and this stamp is the rarest of the regularly issued Confederate states stamps.

Kennedy Thematic Collecting

2011-11-19T07:00:00.005-05:00

Presidential topical collections in general are not very popular largely because there is so little philatelic material that has been issued for most Presidents (quick- name three stamps that have Garfield or the current Presidential flavor-Coolidge- on them or imagine any postal history with a Taft twist). The exceptions are Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and of course JFK. Washington and Jefferson are well commemorated by the United States and there is a fair amount of material available relating to our first President on the various American Revolution thematic issues that have come out over time. Lincoln of course has a great human rights angle and of all American Presidents has been the most widely portrayed on foreign stamps. FDR has a WWII hook and was the only President who was a philatelist, so he has been well remembered on issues throughout the philatelic world. But JFK was different. Struck down by an assassin as a young and vibrant man, JFK has always had the charisma that makes for commemoratives. And so JFK thematic collections have always outnumbered all other American President's thematic collections combined. For years after Kennedy's death the less reputable philatelic countries of the era (many of them Trucial States) churned out high value stamps and specialty items and intentional errors for the American market. Kennedy collections were very difficult to sell on the secondary market, mainly because the owners had paid such crazy prices for their stamps and covers. But in philately at least, time heals all wounds and succeeding generations have bid Kennedy collections to the point that they are downright affordible. When you consider the historic and philatelic interest you might think about adding a few volumes to your shelves especially since we are just two years from the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's death. For those of us who were around to remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, that fact alone is enough to make us really feel old.

First Stamp Albums

2011-11-18T17:37:00.000-05:00

The kids today didn't invent status symbols. Even nerdy stamp collectors have their hierarchies and when I was a young collector in the 1960's status in collecting was acted out in the kind of stamp album that you had (or that your parents bought for you). We all had Harris albums in my stamp club. Scott albums were out of the question-sort of a high power rifle when we all wanted BB guns. The question was what Harris album did you have. The Chevrolet of albums was the Harris Ambassador with room for 15,000 or so stamps. The upscale but still middle class line was taken by the Statesman Deluxe album (which I am proud to say was my first album) and, for showoffs, there was the Citation album boasting space for over 50,000 stamps. Of course we all had to bring our albums to our club meetings and to Cub Scouts and to each others houses to trade. The Ambassador and Statesman Deluxe kids had light weight, easily managed albums that even a youth could comfortably carry under his arm. The Citation boys had it tough though. Their album was hard to manage even for an adult and I can remember how difficult it was for poor Bobby McKeegan to lug his to our meetings. The weight was too much for him and it often looked as if he would drop it and I pitied him so much that I would have given all my stamps to have been burdened with an album like his.

Ryukyu Islands

2011-11-18T07:00:00.018-05:00

There is one entire country under the United States collecting umbrella that has issued hundreds of stamps, which is popular on two continents and which is completable by even collectors of modest means. The country is the Ryukyu Islands which were captured during WWII by the United States at an enormous loss of life and which were administered by us as a territory until 1972. The stamps of the Ryukyu Island have a Japanese flavor and are avidly collected in Japan. There is one great rarity Scott #17 which is a provisional that was issued due to a rate change. Considering its rarity and that the stamp is from a country that is popular in both Japan and the United States, it sells for far less than it should even though its selling price NH is above $1000. I have always found the political and philatelic history of the Ryukyu Islands interesting. When Jimmy Carter negotiated a treaty which returned sovereignty of the Canal Zone to Panama in 1979 he was excoriated by the Republicans as giving away American property and capitulating to political correctness. But when several years before in 1972 the Nixon administration negotiated the return of the Ryukyu Islands to the Japanese, the same people praised it as a reasonable return of territory to an ally. Perhaps it was all in a name. The Ryukyu Islands are called Okinawa by the Americans and we suffered over 62,000 casualties capturing them in WW II, just twenty seven years before we gave them back. Good thing Nixon called them the Ryukyus.

The Apfelbaum Guarantee

2011-11-17T06:41:00.004-05:00

It's been a while since I've written a clear statement of why I think you should buy your stamps from us. The reason is our guarantee. Quite simply we are the only stamp company that assures your complete satisfaction and safety to this degree: buy any stamp or lot and you may return it for any reason within thirty days for a full refund. Further, we guarantee every stamp we sell as being genuine and as described without time limit. This means if you buy a stamp from us and it ever turns out not to be genuine or if it has an undescribed thin we will take it back for a full refund at any time in the future, even years later. We ship virtually every order within 48 hours, answer all emails within hours (actually usually within minutes) and immediately refund any returns. Our descriptions and evaluations of the stamps we sell are clear, accurate and conservative. When you sell to us we pay immediately and in full when we buy from you. Now and then (and it is infrequent but I write about it as I think it speaks to what we are about as a company) an issue comes up with a customer that isn't covered by our guarantee or by any normal business protocol. When this happens we evaluate the situation according to the Golden Rule. The question we ask ourselves is "if it were me in this situation, how would I want to be treated and what would I think is a reasonable solution to my problem". We don't satisfy every customer every time but we come pretty close. We are fortunate enough not to have to make every sale and not to have to grind every last dollar out of each transaction. We want our work day to be pleasant and rewarding and we want our customers to be happy and satisfied with their dealing with us. I don't get to personally interact with as many of our customers as I would like, but please remember that if we ever disappoint you I hope you'll contact me and let me make things right.

Post Office Loses $5Billion

2011-11-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

No normal business can lose $5 billion and have the management stay intact and have no cohesive plan for turning things around. But then the United States Post Office is no normal business. Actually, despite being dressed up in capitalist cloth, it really isn't a business at all. It is a government agency and as a government agency the USPS is subject to lots of rules and regulations and accounting procedures that private enterprise never encounters. For instance, what business would be required to deliver its service to every spot in the United States at the same cost. A letter from my office to the most isolated spot in the fifty states or a letter sent next door costs the same 44c. Package rules and rates and classes of service have to vetted through a postal rate commission and deny the USPS the nimbleness to respond to competitors. Postal accounting makes pension benefits to employees far more expensive in current years than would be the case for private business. Labor negotiations are complicated because of the political influence of the postal unions. The USPS is forbidden from entering allied businesses that would be a perfect match for its paper delivery service. And marketing anything else to the USPS's 320 million subscribers is forbidden. The USPS must retain money losing operations and is unable to expand into moneymaking ones. Seeing how profound the political constraints are that have produced this loss it seem amazing that the loss is only $5 billion. But then, losses and all, the Post Office will always be around. Boxed in by regulation, the USPS is the perfect whipping boy, illustrating the right's belief that government is wasteful and the left's that without government subsidies there will be vastly more unemployment and small towns in Kansas will be forced to do without mail service. Any agency that so well satisfies the agendas of both sides of the political spectrum will have a long, if not very successful, future.

The Danger of Ignorance

2011-11-15T09:07:00.000-05:00

There is probably no activity more of an antidote to ignorance than philately. Ignorance is more than stupidity or incuriousness. It is deliberately lacking respect for learning and understanding as being valuable activities in a complex world. Every hour with his stamps and covers a philatelist is cultivating curiosity. Just yesterday I was working with a wonderful specialized collection of Russian and Ukrainian local issues. Not the Zemstovs, though they are one of the more fascinating philatelic fields, but the locals that were created in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992. Many of the nation states that Russia had incorporated in the Soviet Union broke apart and became separate countries. Some tried to break away and were unable to. Other just saw the political turmoil as an opportunity to issue a few stamps and make a bit of money. Now an ignorant person might look at this collection (and it was in fifteen volumes comprising thousands of different stamps and covers) and say "oh some more stamps from Uzbeki-beki-bekistan". But a philatelist would take this as a wonderful opportunity to research the national aspirations and cultural history of the scores of ethnic groups that had their lives subsumed to Russian imperialism. It is times like this that I am glad I am involved in a hobby that is intellectually expansive. And always keep in mind how dangerous ignorance is.

Hungary

2011-11-14T08:07:00.001-05:00

The stamps of many Eastern European countries have gained tremendously in popularity and price in the last ten years and Hungary has been at the top of the second tier in this regard. Philatelically, the most active Eastern European country has been Russia. Even despite a pull back in the last few years, Soviet period Russian stamps have enjoyed enormous price gains and have been in a class by themselves.The second tier has been made up of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. These three countries have seen great increases in the popularity and price of their stamps due to economic growth fueled by the fall of communism. Romania and Bulgaria started from a much lower base than Hungary and these countries have benefited by being low wage satellite countries for European manufacturers, similar to role that Mexico has for the United States. Despite the Soviet crackdown on Hungary after the 1956 Revolution, the Hungarians have always maintained one of the most independent governments in Eastern Europe and probably had the most thriving economy in 1990. Economic liberalization has certainly helped Hungary but since it was growing from a higher base the effects are not as dramatic as they have been in other Eastern European countries. The stamps of Hungary and among the most interesting and well designed in our hobby and if you are looking for an area to specialize in you could do far worse than this.

Peace of Westphalia

2011-11-13T07:15:00.000-05:00

Printing technology was sophisticated enough for stamps to have been issued hundreds of years before 1840. But, philatelists are fortunate that stamps have been around for only 150 years. As it is now we have issues from nearly 2000 different political-philatelic subdivisions as recognized by Scott (and hundreds of more that are listed by world wide specialty catalogs). Areas such as France-Offices in China (Canton) and Nicaragua-Province of Zelaya (Bluefields) are real areas that issued stamps for real postal needs. Imagine if stamps had been issued through the Middle Ages though the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Much of the history of Europe over the last 1500 years has been of changing borders and political entities. Thousands of political jurisdictions have existed since the fall of the western Roman Empire. Collectors are very fortunate that we only have the last 150 years to worry about geopolitically. The number of countries in our albums are already too many and adding thousands more would be daunting. The only upside would be that we philatelists would have to extend back in time our knowledge of history and geography. I am the go to guy in my family for crossword puzzle clues pertaining to history and geography. But my worldwide knowledge is philatelically based and I know my wife would be very happy if she could count on me to help her with questions before 1840.

Mei Lanfang

2011-11-12T07:06:00.001-05:00

Mei Lan who took the stage name Mei Lanfang was an opera and performance artist who has the philatelic distinction of being commemorated on the most valuable regularly issued world wide philatelic item (not an error or special issue) since World war II. The sheet itself is lovely and Mei is very deserving of the honor of commemoration. He was a Chinese war hero who, having gained widespread Japanese accolades for his performances before the war, refused to perform for the Japanese once they occupied China. He lived in great privation as a result of his decision, nearly starving. After the Revolution he was a People's Republic hero and after his death was commemorated on this lovely Souvenir sheet. The sheet, like most PRC items has enjoyed meteoric growth, going from a $5000 selling price just three years ago for mint to over $22000 in our last sale. As a new issue in 1962 it sold for a few dollars. Even as a used sheet, mostly from First day Covers, it sells for over $12000. The question for me is not whether PRC can continue its meteoric gains. I don't think it can. The question is whether or not as demand from China slows down and as the Chinese economy slows its stupendous growth rate whether the stamps of PRC can maintain their current or similar price levels. My own read is this rise in price in PRC stamps is a classic bubble and we all know what happens to bubbles when people perceive that the item in question is overvalued.

Monkey Business

2011-11-11T08:17:00.001-05:00

Probably no stamp has shot up in value more than the 1980 PRC issue for the Year of the Monkey. Originally this new issue sold mint in the US for under a dollar and the last one we sold brought over $1500. Two factors have brought about this huge rise. The well known reason is the phenomenal increase in the popularity of philately in China and the greatly increasing wealth of that country which has allowed more people to be able to afford to pay more for stamps. That has affected the price of all PRC stamps but why has the price of the Monkey stamp had a rise that is fantastic even when compared with other PRC stamps of the period? A very plausible reason for this was explained to me by a prominent Chinese dealer recently. He told me that China is a closed society politically and that many activities which in this country would be economic transactions in China have a political component. Thus buying a house, opening a business and many more things require permits or forms or other bureaucratic intervention that Americans do not have. Ruling party functionaries have great power but not great income. Bribery in China is punishable by death but gifts are allowed. This dealer suggested to me that as cash would be a bribe, the gift of a stamp to a stamp collector is deemed a gift and is not looked on with nearly the severity if discovered as a cash bribe would be. He said a market has developed so that a certain kind of permit costs "a Monkey" and other more significant help might cost a block of four. I have no way of knowing if this is true but the man who explained to me is intimately connected to the PRC stamp business and ways of doing things. And this wouldn't be the first time that bribery or political factors have fueled philately. By the way, the next time you read an attack on the oversized salaries of public servants and their great retirement packages reflect how rare bribery is in this country and that paying public servants a decent wage continues to be the best way of insuring this.

Two Types Of Collectors

2011-11-10T05:52:00.000-05:00

There are two main types of stamp collectors- I call them call goal collectors and process collectors. Goal collectors are more visible in the hobby as they are one who are actively out there buying and selling stamps, getting new things for their collections, and exhibiting. Goal collectors always know the next stamp that they need and get great pleasure in filling a page. Goals can vary among collectors but the goal is always there. For some the goal is completion, for others it is finding the best deal or competing in the knowledge battles that define much of higher levels of postal history collecting. For goal philatelists, the stamps and covers, though they seem primary, are always subordinated to the goal of completion or competition. Process collectors to use a rather different analogy, enjoy the water. They swim in a philatelic world where the goal is to learn about stamps and the hobby and enjoy the knowledge and history that stamps can impart. Process collectors often make fine collections (many time even "better" than goal collectors) but they do so quietly and are rarely found as exhibitors and writers. We are inclined to overvalue the importance of goal collectors largely because they are so fond of letting us know their importance to the hobby. But process collectors have always been the mainstay of philately. They make up the majority of APS members. They collect over a course of a lifetime enjoying a hobby that is integrated into their lives. Earl Apfelbaum, our founder and my grandfather, was such a collector and person. It has been the purpose of our company to carry on his tradition.

Postage Rate Change

2011-11-09T07:23:00.000-05:00

In January, 2012 the price of sending a letter first class in the United States will rise from 44c to 45c. The increase of only a penny matches the smallest postage rate rise ever and on a percentage basis (a bit more than 2%) is the smallest percentage increase ever by a wide margin. Many have speculated why a business with losses as significant as the USPS would increase rates at such a low level. The standard reasons include navigating the politics and regulations of the Postal Rate Commission and the fact that letters are competing with free forms of communication in the virtual world so postage rates need to be kept low or users will migrate to other platforms. But there is another strong reason for the small rate rise and one that foretells increasingly frequent one and two penny rises. "Forever" stamps are now the mainstay of United States postal emissions. These stamps allow users the right to first class postage at any time in the future with their purchase today. If the Postal Service were to wait several years and announce a large 3c or 4c increase (as they often done have in the past) postal patrons would run out and stock up on "forever" stamps before the rate rise and lock in lower postage rates preventing the postal service from gaining some of what it sought with the postage rise in the first place. This has been the rate increase policy of Canada, Great Britain and Sweden, all of which have had "forever" stamps for years and which have instituted a series of frequent small price increases.

Jordan

2011-11-08T05:45:00.001-05:00

The first issue of Jordan contains some very rare stamps. The entire Middle East was administered by the Turks as part of their Empire until the end of WW II. Turkey was on the wrong side of that war, supporting Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Accordingly, the British supported insurrectionary Middle east forces during WW I against the Turks, including those led by Lawrence of Arabia. Post WW I, the Middle East was a political mess-a large vacuum and not many strong players for power. The British and French imposed their African type solution as they had after the scramble for Africa in the late Nineteenth Century (just drawing borders on a map) and this time the solution was even worse for the West than the African debacle. The nation states of Jordan and Iraq lack internal cohesiveness and are hard to govern (we know that in Iraq and will find that out in Jordan if King Abdullah is ever overthrown). In the case of Jordan, the philately is very difficult. About one hundred different issues exist overprinted on early Palestine stamps issued between 1922-1923. These issues contain some of the rarest stamps in all of our hobby. Nearly all are seldom seen and the one pictured above ( #100) is a great rarity and has a Peter Holcombe certificate. There were only eighty of this stamp issued and if it was a US stamp it would sell for a hundred grand. It will be in our December Auction and as it catalogs $2250 it is likely to sell for as little as $1000.

Pick A Cover

2011-11-07T07:37:00.002-05:00

One of the fascinations of Postal History or cover collecting is the story involved in just about every item and the history it portrays. I reached into a box of covers we bought recently and at random picked out the cover pictured above. Here's the story as best I can reconstruct it: The cover was sent in 1910. It has a stamp of Turkey (Scott #136) and was sent from Kerbala to Teheran. Before WW I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire most of the Middle East was under the political control in one way or another of Turkey. This is why Turkish stamps were being used in Iraq. The letter is sent from Kerbala, one of Iraq's largest cities, which is also the city where Hussein ibn Ali (the grandson of the Prophet who was involved in a dynastic struggle after his death) was martyred in 680. Ali's martyrdom was the central rift between Shi'a Islam and Sunni Islam- a rift that is greater than that between Catholicism and Protestantism (and we know how many centuries of war that dispute caused). Iran is the traditional home to the Shia's and though Iraq has a large Shi'a population, it, like most of the rest of the mid East, is Sunni. The dates indicate that that the sender was on a religious mission to celebrate the anniversary of Ali's death, a major holiday in Shi'a Islam.The writing on the letter is Farsi script (showing that the writer was Persian), not Arabic. All this is from just a casual perusal of a easily found cover worth $20 or so. A real researcher could spend hours on this and have a story on how relations between Iraq and Iran have evolved based on religious animosities between the Shi'as and the Sunnis. And from this the collector could understand a bit better so much of what has been in the news about Iraq over the last twenty years and what will surely be in the news over the next few years as the United States extricates itself from the religious quagmire that has existed there for over a thousand years. Had there been a postal history collector in the White House in 2003 we might not have been so sanguine about the prospects for Iraq after Saddam.

Stamps and Information Technology

2011-11-06T06:54:00.001-05:00

History is best understood on a continuum. WW II was not an isolated occurrence in world history but was the latest conflagration of centuries of territorial and tribal expansion across Europe. Beginning with the Gothic tribes pressing against the Roman Empire in the Second Century through German unification and the Franco Prussian War and WW I , Europe has always been in conflict. Though the proximate cause of each war is different the overall theme has an historical continuity that allows us not to just understand facts and dates and events, but to understand people.Thus it is with stamps. Stamps have been around for 160 years. Their importance as a technology is not so great now, but in the mid part of the Nineteenth Century proof of the prepayment of postage allowed postal rates to plummet and communication to flourish. This in turn allowed more efficient commerce and improved living standards. Postage stamps were part of a humanity's technological advances that facilitated communication. This began well before 1840 and has continued today with the Internet and email. As our collectible we are fixated on stamps. But they are just part of the great success that mankind has had in making life better and easier for us all.

Color

2011-11-05T07:21:00.000-04:00

There is surprising uniformity of color on early stamps. The first stamp, the Penny Black, was -wait for it- black but that was soon seen to be a mistake and within a year the color of the design was changed to what the English call red and which we would call a red-brown. This red brown became the color for the first class postage rate issue of most of the world's major stamp issuing nations.There were two reason for this. First, Rowland Hill's original idea for a postage stamp called for color coding. The first class single rate postage was to be black and the double rate stamp blue. The color coding between different denominations and different rate stamps , which we take as a given, was a decision made to aid postal clerks in their accounting for sold and unsold postage stamps and postal workers in quickly knowing if the correct postage was paid on letters. A bold color like red facilitated this aspect of color coding. Secondly, red (and its shades) was picked for the color of the main postage rate in the early period because red is a very forgiving color for intaglio printing. Engraving requires great skill and care on the part of the printer. Improperly inked plates or inadequately pressed impressions produce a lot of wastage. The red family was found to look better if slightly less than perfectly printed and pigments in the red family were less corrosive to the plates. Philatelists have seen this in their collecting as most common rate stamps (and therefore the most printed) of the Nineteenth century from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany and China and many others are all in the red brown shade area.

African Spring

2011-11-04T05:30:00.000-04:00

One of the most remarkable economic trends of the last several years has been the beginnings of economic growth in sub Saharan Africa. World wide last year, seven of the twenty countries with the highest GDP growth rates were in sub Saharan Africa and only Nigeria could claim that the reason that they were in this group was because of natural resources or oil. Admittedly the growth in Africa is coming from a very depressed level and several years of even stellar growth for these countries does not put them in the realm of places most of us would like to live. But still, growth is growth and it wasn't too long ago that most economists felt that Africa would never be growing at rates that could advance the living standards of its people. Certainly we can't count on such growth continuing. But as wages grow in many other third world countries, business should flock to the lowest wage countries and, if the African work force is good, industry will continue to move there. As philatelists this presents opportunity. Certainly Zimbabwe will never be be China and the Cameroons will never be Korea. But from the perspective of philatelic growth, they don't have to be. The early independent philatelic issues of nearly all African countries and the newer issues of the last ten or fifteen years have been issued and saved in such small quantities that nearly any increase in demand should produce large price gains in these stamps. And such demand does not only have to be indigenous. As Western companies continue to move production and service facilities into these countries the managers of these businesses may well desire to collect the stamps of the countries in which they have been stationed. It's not a slam dunk, but then the dollars aren't huge. When I have an opportunity to put away nice post Independence African sets, I am glad to do so.

Women And Philately

2011-11-03T07:36:00.000-04:00

Women and men probably collect things about equally. Women however just don't collect stamps. Philately has long been a man's domain. After the passing of the "timbramania" phase about 1860, the vast majority of stamp collectors, and certainly the vast majority of more serious philatelists have been men. Of the hundreds of early philatelic books and articles that I've read only a few have been penned by women. Of the people who have listed themselves as "followers" of this blog, all are men. And the APS membership is 90% male. There are three main reasons for this. First there is a male tradition in the hobby that is self reinforcing. My boyhood stamp club didn't exclude girls, but there were no female members either. Several of the club members have returned to their hobby following the long tradition of inactivity during the third, fourth and fifth decades of life. Girls didn't collect much when I was a kid and so they have no fond memories of a hobby to go back to. Second, for most philatelists their hobby is a solitary one-they study and acquire their stamps alone and their contact with others is on the Internet and through magazines, not in person. Women tend to be more social than men and stamp collecting is not an intrinsically social hobby. Even the women who gravitate to the hobby tend to be overrepresented in the social aspects of our hobby such as at stamp clubs and running for the APS Board. Third, society provides more outlets for the collecting needs of women as opposed to men. Many household items that people own in far greater proportion than they need are really satisfying this collecting need. Indulgences in flatware and plates and crystal and closets full of shoes and belts and often the better half indulging their collections. Years ago we had all hoped that the future of the hobby would have a more feminine flavor. This hasn't happened and it doesn't look likely in the near future either.

Gum

2011-11-02T07:36:00.000-04:00

Stamps are a product of four factors-paper, printing, perfs and gum. The first three get alot of press. Gum, however, is usually only written about if it is present or if it has been fraudulently reapplied. Stamp gums were originally derived from gum Arabic, a extract of the Acacia tree. These trees are tapped like Maple trees are for their syrup, and the resulting gum has a variety of commercial applications including glue, as an important additive to inks (thus involving gum Arabic in two phases of stamp production) and even foods. In the early days of stamp production, gum was brushed onto the stamp paper with large brushes by hand, usually after the stamps were printed. The hand applied quality of the gum led to varying thickness on the back of the paper. These variations in the gum made the stamp paper expand and contract over time at differing rates due to humidity and temperature, and led the gum to crack and to damage the stamp paper that it was adhering to. Further, gum Arabic is an organic compound and is prone to bacteria and spoilage. These qualities are what make "original gum" on the pre 1890 issues so scarce. Collectors in this earliest period were advised to wash off the gum as being the only way to insure that their mint stamps would remain undamaged. The pervasiveness of air conditioning after WW II, and the advent of modern gums evenly applied by machine made gum more stable and led to the NH phenomenon that is the current collecting standard for modern stamps. But NH is largely a choice that technology has allowed as collectors in the older period really were doing the best by their stamps by washing off the adhesive. It is interesting to speculate what effect the latest technological advance- self stick adhesives- will do for gum collecting. These stamps are saved with an adhesive backing and so the term NH for them is an anachronism. As younger collectors (who only know self adhesives) mature, it will be interesting to see if they pay the same attention (and premiums) for NH that is paid today.

Famine

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-04:00

Thematic stamp collecting along conceptual lines has never really caught hold. There was a great gold medal collection making the rounds of the APS Champion of Champion shows several years ago entitled "Murder" where the collector sought to portray how murder was shown on stamps from individual murderers to genocide (such as the Holocaust). But few other thematic collections have tried the "concept" route and today we are mostly stuck with thematics such as Birds on Stamps or Disney which really only use stamps as pictures in a scrapbook to illustrate the collection's thematic point. Famine, however, would be a great "concept" thematic. The collection could trace the history of food with various stamps illustrating different grains and the impact that the discovery of the America's made on food production worldwide and the help that potatoes and corn had in feeding the world. Revenues for taxes on foodstuffs could be included. The collection could touch on climate and how warming and cooling trends affect food production and how droughts create famine. The Irish potato famine would be a great specialized collection within the main collection along with the Irish diaspora, immigration to America and the Irish contributions to this country which all came about because of the Potato Famine. The collection could touch on the difference between climate caused famines and political famines and their relation to genocide (the two greatest famines of the twentieth century being Stalin's 1920s collectivization in Russia and Mao's Great Leap Forward (which was anything but) in the late 1950s and early 1960s). The collection would combine history, postal history and stamps in a novel and interesting way and tie our hobby into what is happening in the world at large. This is a connection which traditional philately has sorely lacked.

A Great Auction Purchase

2011-10-31T09:04:00.000-04:00

In the 1970s Public Auctions were much more frequent (and there were far more philatelic auction companies) and there was no Internet. Auction firms sent out a thousand or so auction catalogs to their best customers and mainly solicited bids by mail. There was no email or fax machines, few phone bids and no live computer bidding Because of these factors there was spotty coverage at many auctions and many lots really did sell cheaply. In 1976, I was in London bumming around a bit after college. I supported myself by doing a bit of stamps, going to auctions. But life then didn't require much support- Europe for an American in those days could be very cheap. I was sitting at a H R Harmer auction in London. Harmer was one of the "venerables"- one of several old line English auction firms that went back to the earliest days of our hobby. Their auctions were stuffy affairs and I was the only person in the room that day under the age of 100 and who didn't smoke. The Canada section began and it was this that I was interested in. In those days one could usually buy certain countries in Europe for profitable resale in the United States. For instance, the Scandinavian catalogs listed Iceland for far less than Scott in those days and you could buy often buy Iceland for resale. Canada had a long trading history with Great Britain in the nineteenth century and there were far greater quantities of early Canada in England (from the mail that was sent) than in the US and so you could usually buy Canada profitably for resale. So I was ready for the Canada section of the Harmer sale. But I wasn't ready for the the 12 Penny Canada when it came up. The 12p is Canada's rarest stamp (and one of the rarest stamps in the hobby) with some fifty copies estimated to exist in collectors hands. It cataloged $20,000 then (it catalogs $100k today). It opened at 2400 Pounds which was the just a bit over $4000. Before I could think I had put up my hand and before anyone else could think the auctioneer had knocked down the lot to me. Within a week I had sold the stamp for $15,000.

The One That Got Away

2011-10-30T13:35:00.001-04:00

Most people involved in this hobby are glad to tell you of their great finds. Last week John Murray died and he was involved in one of the great finds of the last thirty years in the entire hobby of philately. And it was at my expense. In 1995, I bought a pretty mediocre quality US collection at an auction in Switzerland. The dollar was very strong in those days and I went to Europe quite often to buy stamps for resale. This particular collection looked to me to be nothing special but I made a big mistake when I didn't carefully check the One Cent 1851s. The collection in question sold for about $1500 to a Houston collector John Murray and he carefully checked the stamp that I should have and found it to be a variety, Scott#5. The stamp was worth $40,000 and John had bought it in a lot where he had paid about $10 for that particular stamp. Most of our lots don't work out that well for the buyer but John Murray could tell you that he probably got more value from that auction lot than from any other purchase he ever made. John was a brilliant computer programmer and a good friend to us and to our hobby. He died in a tragic fall at his home and was only in his mid 60s. He will be missed.