US Stamp Covers
You've Got Mail Bombs: Tracking Down the Most Dangerous Letters in the World
By Ben Marks — Some stamp collectors are obsessed with first-day covers, while others love fancy cancels, but only a handful of philatelists harbor postal passions that could be described as explosive. You might say Dale Speirs is one such collector—the pieces of postal history that get him excited are parcel and letter bombs. Not the unexploded variety, of course. Rather, Speirs is interested in evidence of these often fatal forms of philately, such as a mark on a letter verifying it’s been “bomb...
Moon Landing Must-Haves: Signed Apollo 11 Postal Covers
By Matthew Haley — An autograph of the first man who walked on the Moon is a must-have for space-history collectors. But an astronomical number of forgeries of Neil Armstrong's signature fly around in the market place, so buyers are understandably nervous. The so-called "insurance" postal covers from Apollo 11 are a safe way of acquiring the crew's autographs. As Buzz Aldrin has explained, "Since we were unable to obtain adequate life insurance due to the high risk nature of being an astronaut, we signed...
In Postal History, Every Stamp Tells a Story
By Maribeth Keane — I have a stamp collection, but I don’t consider myself a collector. I have a collection of my initials on stamps from Great Britain. I’ve been collecting those for a long time, but I’m a dealer and a consultant for postal history more than a stamp collector. My interest started with boy scouts when I was 12 years old. I needed a couple of merit badges to complete my eagle scout, so I borrowed some of my sister’s stamp collection and mounted them because I thought it would be an easy...
The Patriotic Envelope in Civil War Days
By James Brush Hatcher — The spontaneous upsurge of Blue and Gray patriotism generated by the Civil War is amazingly well caught and preserved in the colorful, heroic, flag-waving and caricaturing envelope designs with which lithographers and printers flooded the nation in the Abe Lincoln-Jeff Davis period. The "patriotic envelope" is a war-time propaganda phenomenon which was repeated in Spanish-American days and is with us again in the current conflict. Flags, eagles, clasped hands and figures of Columbia...
Stamp Collector Bob Allen on Stamp Design and Production Techniques
By Maribeth Keane — Like many collectors, I collected when I was a child, and then I became interested again in the ‘90s. I think eBay and other Internet auction sales had a little bit to do with it. I just started playing with stamps and got interested again. Living in Hawaii, you don’t have the option of going to dealers all around the country, and a lot of the bigger ones are on the East Coast. There are a couple of stamp dealers in Hawaii, but not that many. Collectors Weekly: Do you specialize in specific...