1910
Maurice Apfelbaum, Earl
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…
The world was very different in 1960 than it is today. The universe was only four billion years old, a considerable age but adolescent compared to the nearly 14 billion years astronomers think it is today. Black holes hadn’t been theorized or discovered. There was less documentation to prove evolution, as DNA had only been worked out a…
Great Britain was the innovator in postal and philatelic matters. It produced the first postage stamps (see Chapter 2), but the color of the one-penny stamp, the Penny Black, was soon considered unsuitable. The black made it difficult to cancel effectively and the post office in Britain, like its counterparts throughout the world, feared that…
Cover collecting did not begin at the same time as did stamp collecting. Philately had its start in earnest about 1860, and, really, until about 1910, cover collecting was something collectors did when they didn’t have the time to wash the stamps they needed for their collections off the envelopes on which they had bought…
Burma, which its citizens call Myanmar, is one of the least developed countries in the world. Until two hundred years ago Burma was a feudal pre industrial society with the vast majority of land owned by a few war lords and families who were traditionally at war with each other. A hundred year British Occupation had little…
Imagine a company, which like the Scott publishing company, (so dominant in United States philately) is preeminent as its national stamp publisher. As well as issuing a general worldwide catalog, they are especially known as the publisher of the national specialty catalog which is used by nearly all native philatelists and millions of foreign ones. But in addition to this, they also…