Hello World

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…

It is a curious fact, mostly to do with poorly designed and implemented rules, that banking crises in tiny countries can bring the world financial system nearly to collapse. Places like Iceland and Cyprus, which were more well known to philatelists than to the general public, have been given the power (by the European Union’s bizarrely lax banking rules) to…

Collecting airmail stamps was a far more popular specialty forty years ago than it is today. Airmail was a major technological advance in communications. Before 1920 the quickest any paper communication could get from one place to another was approximately five hundred miles a day providing expensive railroad lines had been laid. Railroads were ubiquitous…

Innovations are largely incremental. When phones first became portable, they were simply portable phones. It took Steve Jobs (and better technology) to add cameras and computers to phones, so that most of us could walk around with more computing power in our pockets than existed worldwide thirty years ago. The fact that they are also phones…

Plate numbers were put in the margins of United States sheets so that later the printer would know which sheets were printed from which plates so that plate wear and damage could be monitored. Collectors noticed the marginal numbers and began at first collecting single stamps with the selvedge attached as an adjunct to their…

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…