Philatelic Errors Freaks and Oddities
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...
Will an Inverted Jenny Turn the Stamp World Upside Down Again?
By Ben Marks — This weekend, on Sunday, September 22, 2013, the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum opens to the public. The gallery has been in the works since the fall of 2009, when Gross, who made his billions (yes, plural…) as the founder of the Pimco Total Return bond fund, donated $8 million to the National Postal Museum. "Robey saw the discrepancy right away.'" Among the 20,000-plus items on display in the 12,000-square-foot space is a block of four 24-cent...
Flying the 'Freak' Flag: Documentary Will Reveal Why You Should Care About Stamps
By Lisa Hix — Chicago-based documentary filmmaker Mark Cwiakala grew up surrounded by stamps, yet, he never felt compelled to become a collector himself. However, eight years ago, he teamed with executive producer Jonathan Singer to go on a globetrotting journey to find out what exactly made stamps so irresistible to his grandfather and father, both well-respected philatelists. The younger Cwiakala and Singer, who head the film and commercial production company Concentrated, traveled from Monte Carlo to...
John Hotchner Exposes Philatelic Errors, Freaks, and Oddities
By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway — My father was a stamp collector, and I just took to it. He was perfectly happy to mentor me, so I began collecting at the age of five and got serious about it around the age of 11. I started collecting the world, but when it became obvious that that was not something that I could ever complete, I reduced my scope to about 20 different countries, including the United States. Early on I got interested in errors, freaks, and oddities, known as EFOs, including interesting cancellations and color...
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...