During the nineteenth century, several nations maintained post offices in China. This was was part of a general carving up of Chinese sovereignty which went on throughout the nineteenth century. To facilitate those post offices stamps were issued. Italy issued stamps for use in China in 1917, France beginning in 1901 (and ending in 1945,…
When one is avid about a field, it is common to set greater and greater challenges. This is the lure of Everest for climbers or of more and more difficult golf courses. I once knew a stamp collector who was also a fierce crossword puzzle enthusiast. He wrote puzzles in which the answers were all…
Lanie Murphy was a lucky young woman. On her twenty first birthday, her grandfather gave her a group of stamps that he had received from his father when his father died. The great-grandfather was never a stamp collector; rather, in the 1920’s, flush with money from his job on Wall Street, he bought a mint block of four…
The desire to collect is innate and probably relates to the gatherer instinct that separates humans from other primates. But in a world in which one can collect everything from antique barbed wire to Victorian pocketbooks, why do people collect stamps? The answer, I think, comes down to three factors: community, size, and orderliness. First,…
The best inventions are often the simplest and, for simplicity and usefulness, philately’s greatest invention was the stamp hinge. The hinge wasn’t actually invented, rather it evolved. The earliest collectors just licked their mint stamps to put them in their albums and made a paste to gum down their used stamps. As the Nineteenth Century progressed, collectors started…
Some of the most popular US philatelic issues of the twentieth century are the Farley issues. They are Scott #753-771, and though avidly collected today, like many popular stamps, they had a checkered past. James A. Farley was a New York party politician who was instrumental in Franklin Roosevelt’s rise to the Democratic Party nomination…