Comparative Costs

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…

The German area,  as collected by the Michel catalog is the most diverse and complicated collecting area in the world. The Michel Germany specialized catalog and the Gansachen (that is postal stationery catalogs) of German and the German Area run nearly 4000 pages and list and price nearly one million stamps and specialty pieces. A…

Confederate States philately has always enjoyed enormous popularity. The stamps are interestingly printed, served a real postal purpose, and the story behind the stamps has real philatelic appeal- large nation, rent by discord, one section withdraws from union to preserve the ability to own human beings as property, the other side fights to retain the…

In the last ten years two main areas of philately have seen substantial rises in prices and popularity- Russia and China. But the increases have not been all in straight lines. Rather, for a period prices rise substantially, and then fall back either with general economic weakness or because of market demand. What has been interesting in…

For many years there was no relationship between the price of stamps and the price of gold. The value of gold, in currency terms, was fixed by national governments whereas the price of stamps was left to rise and fall with the market. Gold was decoupled from currency in 1971. The next ten years saw…

Stamp collecting has always been an International hobby and there is no better example of this than the issue of measuring perforations. Europeans and Americans differ on how they take temperature(Celsius versus Farenheit) and distance ( miles versus kilometers). But collectors all around the world use the same types of perforation gauges and count perfs…