Early Apfelbaum

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 sends out thousands of packages per year, mostly through the postal…

The world of philatelic writing is largely about extolling rarities and unusual stamps. But of the trillions of stamps that have been issued only a trivial fraction of one percent have any individual philatelic value and are ever sold individually. Most stamps are mixture stamps, stamps that have been soaked off envelopes and packages or…

The Philadelphia Stamp Show was held in Valley Forge, PA last month and it was a small shadow of its old self. Thirty or forty dealers plied their mostly tired wares and the exhibits looked like the same group that has been competing for gold since the California Gold Rush of ’49. Every years shows…

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…