A Cool US Error

Postal abuse in Great Britain continued to get worse. As might be expected, the post office became an unprofitable and inefficient enterprise. Complaints mounted on all sides— from merchants, clergy and government. Finally, in 1837, a forty-two-year-old ex-schoolteacher and government bureaucrat named Rowland Hill published a pamphlet entitled Post Office Reform, Its Importance and Practibility. Hill’s pamphlet…

Stamps monitor history; they are not issued in a vacuum. In its broadest sense, postal history is history. Throughout the early part of the nineteenth century great tensions between the North and the South, over economic matters and over slavery, culminated in the secession from the United States of the state of South Carolina on…

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…

There are two main ways to collect stamps—by country or by theme. Until about 1960, collectors nearly always collected by country. The reason was simple: In the era before widespread commemoratives, there were few themes that had enough philatelic material to make collecting them enjoyable. Early popular thematics were Scouting, Red Cross, children’s welfare, and…

The 1950’s were the beginning of the modern period in philately. The overarching history of our hobby is a triad-the classic period from about 1850 to about 1910 defined by world wide collectors studying and accumulating their stamps with scant regard for quality (and even little attention to genuineness). Then there was the middle period, 1910-1950,…

Perhaps the greatest American philatelist was John N Luff. Born in 1860 and a collector from childhood, he was involved in US philately in its very earliest years. Luff became a professional philatelist in his twenties and was the President of the Scott Stamp and Coin Company and an editor of the Scott catalog. He…