Stamp Collecting
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...
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...
Cheryl Ganz of the National Postal Museum on Inverted Jennys and Burning Zeppelins
By Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks — I’ve been a lifelong collector, even as a kid. There are just certain people for whom collecting seems to be part of their nature. My mother always tells the story about when I was three years old they’d give me dolls. I never played mother and baby. Instead, I put my dolls on a shelf and spent every day rearranging them. Collectors not only care about acquisitions; they care about organizing their stuff and figuring out what’s missing and how to make a good story of their collection. And...
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...
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...
Postally Used Works of Art
By James Brush Hatcher — Paintings and sculpture galore have been reproduced on postage stamps, sort of an Everyman's art gallery. But this, of course, does not mean that any old work of art makes a good stamp subject. Pictures generally are too complicated, believes Paul Manship, the sculptor, who designed the current one cent green Four Freedoms stamp. But portraits, like Gilbert Stuart's "Atheneum" head of Washington, usually do very well, he thinks. He is certain, however, that Whistler's "Portrait of...
Essays, The Stamp Designs That Also Ran
By James Brush Hatcher — It was a shock to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing when a critic pointed out that the view of "Gatun Locks," which it had engraved and so titled on the design for the two cents red Panama-Pacific Exposition stamp of 1912, was really a picture of San Pedro Miguel Locks. Plates had been made from the die, and hundreds of thousands of stamps were printed. Every one was destroyed, after some eagle-eye spotted the error, and the die was altered to the safely general title, "Panama...