CLASSIC LATIN AMERICA

News, commentary and opinion on Central and South American philately

Moorhouse Part II, SCADTA, Knox Martin & Bulls Eyes

Bolivia National Aviation School 10c Inverted
Bolivia National Aviation School 10c Inverted. A block of four from the Brian Moorhouse Part II sale

As the decade draws to a close there is still the opportunity to squeeze in a final few auctions to tempt the Latin American bidder.

But first to a brief summary of the Nicaragua sale earlier this month. This was always going to be a difficult auction on which to correctly assess reserves. In comparison to stamps from Europe, the US or British Empire, Nicaraguan material is (generally) very inexpensive.

How then, do you value stamps worth cents in the catalogue but with varieties, usages and so on that would take significant effort to put together, despite the theoretical low value?

The answer, of course, is to let Mr. Market decide.

Inevitably, the ‘mini collections’ fetched the highest prices but there were still some choice lots left on the table. The 1913-14 Gold Currency Surcharge Collection soared from a low estimate of $1500 to $5250, illustrating the rarity of some of these usages. Also noteworthy was the 1954/71 Communications Week Tax Issue Collection which fetched a surprising $2800 on a reserve of $750.

Two juicy collections left behind were the ‘Seebecks’ and the 1921 Centenary exhibit. Both popular areas but the reserves were too bullish at $5000 apiece. No doubt we will see these reassessed and absorbed into Part II of the Byerly collection next year.

December Auctions

On 3rd December, Corinphila will auction the second part of the late Brian Moorhouse’s dealer stock. As before, each of the Latin American republics is represented with choice material. Whatever you collect, you’ll find something here you’d be happy to grace your collection.

Also offered via private treaty are Brian’s own collections of Tierra del Fuego (the ‘Popper’ stamps), the Haiti Liberty Heads and the Chaco War. Deep pockets required.

1891 Blue and Green Tierra del Fuego essays with a trial print in orange: from Moorhouse Part II
1891 Blue and Green Tierra del Fuego essays with a trial print in orange: from Moorhouse Part II

Finishing off the year is Siegel, who are offering the SCADTA Air Post Collection of Santiago Cruz on December 10th. Highly specialized, this auction focuses almost entirely on the 1920-21 issue and its subsequent overprints.

A further fifty plus lots of Colombia are also available in Siegel’s worldwide sale that same week. This also includes a complete set of the ten positions of the 1919 Knox Martin 2 cent overprint on cover, each being sold individually.

Lastly, in the same sale, is a decent run of Brazilian Bulls Eyes, with eighteen choice lots to choose from.

Barring any late announcements, that’s the 2019 Latin America auction season closed for another year. Roll on 2020.

The Collector | Neal West | Nicaragua

Neal West Nicaragua

For more than twenty years, Neal West was the President of The Nicaragua Study Group (N.S.G). His most recent exhibit is Nicaragua’s Revenue Based Postal Provisional Stamps and Uses 1908-1911.

CLA How did you first begin to collect stamps?

NW My father was a life-long stamp collector and not surprisingly (for the period of the late 1940’s and 1950’s) I grew up collecting mostly used worldwide stamps. Of course inexpensive mint stamps were added occasionally since the ‘pictures’ on the stamps were so much nicer with ‘light’ or no cancels.

CLA What got you interested in collecting Nicaragua?

NW I traveled by car through Mexico and Central America to San Jose, Costa Rica in 1972 and was fascinated with these exotic places, especially Nicaragua and Costa Rica. So from that point on I collected Central American stamps.

Over the next 15 or so years I was able to put together quite advanced, mostly mint stamp collections for all Central American countries. Guatemala and Costa Rica had very active specialty societies that I joined.

Then in 1990 I was offered the chance to become a founding member of the Nicaragua Study Group (I discovered years later that Clyde Maxwell, the N.S.G founder, had obtained the names and addresses of people who had expressed an interest in Nicaragua when they joined the American Philatelic Society).

I immediately recognized that scholarship about Nicaraguan philately was at an early stage and that almost any manuscript was very welcome in the N.S.G journal, Nicarao. Clyde encouraged me to help fill the pages with any subject related to Nicaraguan philately that interested me at the time.

Since I had written many scientific research articles in my profession, putting thoughts down on paper (and negotiating with editors) was not a new exercise for me, as this was a skill that I already had.

Nicaragua 1903 Revenues
Nicaragua’s general revenue stamp of 1903, printed by Waterlow in London. There were seven postal issues of these stamps with a further four modified for use in Zelaya

CLA Why is Nicaragua an interesting area to collect?

NW For the past 170 years (which has roughly coincided with the postage stamp era) Nicaragua’s history has been as turbulent as any country. For a North American, the revolutions, dictatorships, U.S. Marine interventions and Inter-oceanic Canal controversies helped to create an exotic, romantic fascination with the country – which, quite naturally, was reflected in the stamps.

And when I came to recognize that the postal history – i.e. the stories revealed on covers –  was a rich source of stories that could be told, I was hooked.

CLA What are your key areas of interest?

NW I began collecting covers with airmail: first flights especially and the Palace & Cathedral postal stationery during the period 1921-1932 kept appearing in my collection.

I met John Allen, another Nicaragua collector, at a stamp show and we became friends. When he saw that I had gathered many interesting 2c postal stationery envelopes he suggested that I exhibit them.

John was an experienced exhibitor. He laid out sixteen blank pages on a table, placed my envelopes on the pages and said to write something about them on each page. Over time he edited my descriptions and showed me how to mount the envelopes and helped me to enter the sixteen page, one frame exhibit in an A.P.S. stamp show.

I received a gold medal and so naturally I continued, although subsequent exhibits received every medal possible with only a minority of gold ones.

CLA What have been the main challenges in building your collection?

NW I now collect mainly to exhibit, so obtaining a critical mass of material is the biggest challenge. Fortunately I have been doing this in the company of a group of like-minded Nicaragua exhibitors. We have traded and occasionally sold material between us to get things we ‘needed’ for exhibits by giving up nice material to others that they ‘needed’ for their exhibits or collections.

eBay and other auctions have become more important in recent years but none of us has had sufficient money to buy huge holdings or previous persons’ exhibits for many tens of thousands of dollars.

CLA Tell us about some of your favorite items in the collection.

NW Domestic uses that have survived and covers to destinations other than Germany and the United States are the hardest to find. So they are most precious since they ‘balance’ the exhibit.

Nicaragua Revenues 1908-11
Spot the difference. Near identical revenues printed around 1908-11, this time re-engraved by Perkins Bacon

CLA If you could add one item to your collection, what would it be? Why?

NW Any use from the Department of Zelaya (on the isolated Caribbean coastal area) during the period when the currencies and postal rates differed (circa 1902-1912) from the rest of the Country in Western Nicaragua. These are very difficult to find and are avidly sought after by all advanced collectors of Nicaragua.

CLA Do you have other collecting interests?

NW I only collect Nicaragua stamps and those just for exhibits. I have also collected some local and regional postal history but those collections and small exhibits are more for fun than for National level exhibits.

CLA What advice do you have for a new collector considering starting a Nicaragua collection?

NW I recommend joining the Nicaragua Study Group, doing your research by looking at past issues of our journal Nicarao (available on CD) and talking to the members via email or at stamp shows. There are many opportunities remaining to build important, unique collections and exhibits but without knowledge it is easy to become discouraged if you waste effort and money needlessly.

One can easily and cheaply collect large numbers of Nicaragua stamps and covers and fill albums and binders –  and that, of course,  is just fine. But if you want to make a real contribution to Nicaraguan philately it makes sense to ‘study the terrain’ first.

The good news is that there are so many niches open that you will still find yours.

The Nicaragua Study Group can be contacted by emailing Michael Schreiber at momotombo@woh.rr.com

New to Nicaragua? Check out Graham Beck’s excellent video on Nicaragua in the Exploring Stamps series.

Do you have a collection of Latin America that you would like to share with readers? Drop me a mail at nick@classiclatinamerica.com with your details.

Important Nicaragua at Harmers

1862 2c Dark blue, block of 18, “TE” of “Porte” joined variety at position 6

H.R. Harmer have been dropping hints about Bill Byerley’s Nicaragua collection coming to market for quite a while now but with the barest of details. That situation changed this week with the release of the auction catalogue, set to take place on November 12th.

A named Nicaraguan auction is an infrequent event; one of the size of Byerley’s holdings even less so (and this is only Part 1…).

Byerley’s collection is probably the most comprehensive ever formed and includes material absorbed from the substantial collections of Kilian Nathan, John Stroub and the specialist Nicaraguan catalogue compiler Clyde Maxwell.

There are collections within a collection here, offering opportunities to acquire a solid foundation for a new specialization.

Any Nicaragua collector looking to plug those elusive gaps or find that vital postal history item will be paying very close attention.

A limited quantity of Byerley stock has already been drip-fed into the market on eBay via Oquist Stamps but the core of the collection is with Harmers.

Catalogue pricing for Nicaragua is somewhat erratic (indeed, as it is for so much of Latin America). The sheer volume of varieties, small quantities printed and limited availability can make market monitoring something of an uphill struggle.

Expect some pricing revisions once the realisations have been assessed.

eBay disrupts catalogue publishing with Stamp Market Index

Stamp Market Index

eBay and Noble Spirit launch online database with over 200 million price transactions

We’re now used to most facets of our lives being ‘disrupted’ by the advent of the internet. There are few business sectors that have not had to adjust or reinvent their business models to stay ahead of the game in today’s online world.

The niche world of stamp catalogue publishing has remained relatively untouched.

Until now.

eBay has licenced its entire archived database of stamp transactions: over 200 million sales dating back to 2004. This is then supplemented with new sales figures, as they occur, building a vast repository of transactional stamp data across both auction and ‘Buy It Now’ categories.

This huge dataset has had a simple, searchable front-end wrapped around it to enable you to identify the selling price of any stamp sold on the website over the past fifteen years. Noble Spirit, an eBay collectibles dealer, has negotiated the deal and set up a subsidiary company to manage the initiative.

Collectors and dealers now have the ability to search for any stamp and identify every example ever sold on the site, enabling a quick understanding of what any given stamp is likely to be worth if sold online.

And (for now) its free to use.

It’s a huge leap forward in the transparency of stamp values and is going to force catalogue publishers to take a long, hard look at how they reach their valuations (are you listening Stanley Gibbons?).

A superb resource but not perfect

That said, the data is not infallible and you are going to have to come to your own conclusions around the worth of any given stamp. Let’s say I’m looking for Brazil Scott 78. A search for Brazil 78 gives me 698 records to choose from at the time of writing. There are plenty of entries showing the stamp I’m after but quite a few are irrelevant. If I’m wanting an unmounted mint example, I must then qualify further using the search term unmounted. Or should that be MNH? Or UMM?

And if I want the full story, I need to know that a Scott 78 = Michel 37  = Yvert 47 = SG67, and so on.

You get the picture. You’re going to need to be inventive.

Naysayers will also counter that eBay listings will show examples of everything from the perfectly centred, post office fresh candidate through to dog-eared, thinned, mint-no-gum examples and all points in between. And that’s before you start considering the the reperfs, the regums, the forgeries etc.

But this database has one huge advantage: critical mass. Taking my Brazil Scott 78 example above, even if I discount 50% of the entries with having insufficient detail, that still leaves me with 350 records to choose from. And if I just search for ‘used’ and end up with 100 examples that have sold between $20-$30…well, that’s probably the market price for that stamp.

Valuable search capabilities for online sellers

Dealers and online sellers will find numerous ways to interrogate the data to their benefit. For example:

Items without catalogue prices. Say you want to sell a plate proof and have no idea how to price it. Trawl the database and find out what previous examples have sold for in the past.

Stamps with very few transactions listed. If you find that the stamp you wish to sell has only appeared once or twice on eBay over the past fifteen years, you might assume that asking full catalogue (or more) would be a wise strategy.

Stamps considered undervalued. Over valuations in stamp catalogues are commonplace but the opposite is also true in numerous cases. Why sell a stamp catalogued at $5 for a similar price when the data tells you that collectors have happily bid up to $25 in the past?

Useful for ‘investors’?

Noble Spirit are promoting Stamp Market Index as a tool for investors, with an ability to “reference index projections to shape investment decisions” (huh?).

I’m not so sure.

Yes, there are numerous examples of high value items having been sold on eBay. But it’s a very small percentage of the overall volume of transactions. eBay excels in the low to mid-range stuff. But high ticket items and material that one might call ‘investment grade’ are still very much dominated by the traditional auction houses.

And I don’t see that situation changing anytime soon.

Now if Stamp Market Index were to blend eBay’s data with the collective historical realisations from the Stamp Auction Network…well, I’d probably be more convinced of its suitability as a tool for aspiring investors (whoever they might be).

Where does this leave Scott, Michel, Gibbons and Yvert?

So will you continue to use the prices in your catalogue as a guide or will you use this new source of actual sales data? It’s inevitably going to ask collectors to question whether they need to update their catalogues once again or whether they choose to rely on this new online tool instead.

Ironically, for the catalogue publishers, they’ve just been presented with more pricing data than their editorial teams will ever be able to handle. But given the resource, catalogue publishers can now (theoretically) get closer to accurate pricing than ever before.

And here lies a somewhat ethical quandary.

How will we all use this new resource? By searching using the proprietary numbering systems of the catalogue publishers. And what do they get out of this? Nada, zilch, nothing…as far as I can tell.

Is that fair? Is this a philatelic leap forward or will lost revenue to catalogue publishers put their businesses at risk?

And will we now start to treat eBay sales data as the true worth of a stamp, rather than simply the price a collector selling his duplicates happened to get at 3.00am on a Tuesday morning?

As to the future, I’d bet on seeing more development of the data. A little AI (artificial intelligence) interrogation, cleaning up the outliers and creating structured search fields for often used terms would create a dynamic pricing tool that the incumbent publishers would find hard to follow.

As they say, watch this space…

What do you think…?

Try Stamp Market Index out for yourself at www.stampmarketindex.com

 

Exhibiting Latin America…from Denver to Stockholm (Part 2)

Stockholmia 2019

Back in Europe, the philatelic world was gearing up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Philatelic Society by hosting Stockholmia 2019 in the Swedish capital.

This was a somewhat unusual blend of regional Scandinavian stamp show combined with a truly world class philatelic event, attracting around 8000 participants from 51 countries.

Drawing on the RPSL’s august membership and with significant resource and preparation behind it, Stockholmia was a well organised, innovative celebration of the Royal’s status as the world’s pre-eminent philatelic Society.

With a decent marketing budget, the streets of Stockholm carried an array of promotional posters and banners to encourage an intrigued public to investigate further. This wasn’t a stamp show in the traditional sense though; dealers were thin on the ground and most stands were taken up by the international auction fraternity.

If you’d come to rifle through the dollar boxes, this was the wrong place.

Stockholmia advertising

Stockholmia advertising
Advertisements for the show in Stockholm

It was most certainly the right place for exhibiting though.

The quality of was of an expectedly high standard, with seventy Large Golds and nearly one-hundred Golds awarded for the international participants. Exceptional displays were the order of the day, with philatelic gems from the Queen’s Royal Collection getting a rare outing in a dimly-lit, designated display area.

No doubt the insurers breathed a sigh of relief when the thing was over.

Large Gold Latin American award winners in the Traditional Philately category were James Johnson for his ‘Colombia Classic Issues 1859-68’ and Roland Nordberg for ‘Classic Costa Rica to the 1889 Correos Overprint Issue’

You can view the full results on the Stockholmia website.

[Note: I see many Latin American exhibits that are written in English by a non-native speaker. This sometimes means that a superb display can be let down by incorrect grammar or misspellings. If you would like your exhibit proof-read and checked for accuracy and readability, I can help. Get in touch if you would like to discuss]

Probably the most valuable gathering of stamps on the planet…

The size of the stamp market

As with the Rocky Mountain Stamp Show, an essential part of this event were the presentations, held in side rooms throughout the five days.

Two of the Big Four catalogue publishers held court. Editor of the highly-regarded Scott Classic Specialised Catalogue, Jay Bigalke (a fellow Latin American collector), provided an overview of this important work whereas, Hans Hohenester, the Managing Director of Michel gave the European perspective.

Apparently Michel are now dealing with around 20,000-30,000 new stamps each year from approximately 200 postal administrations. Just who buys all this stuff? The fact that that 99% of these issues will never make it to a post office, let alone see the front of an envelope, makes you wonder how long they can continue to legitimately be called postage stamps.

‘Stickers’, perhaps?

Michel’s recent research concluded that there were somewhere between forty and fifty million collectors worldwide with around twenty million of those in China.

Now I’m always sceptical of those sorts of numbers.

You’ve probably got to have a very loose interpretation of the word ‘collector’ to get to fifty million but Christoph Gärtner’s presentation gave some more precise food for thought. Germany (not the US) is the largest stamp market in the world so the numbers it produces are a good bellwether for the state of the hobby.

Gärtner opined that collectors in the Far East were now starting to look beyond their own shores for their collecting interests and that  the Asian market was a key focus for their business. Over the past eighteen auctions, his company had attracted over 75,000 bidders, had sold over 170,000 collections and was now turning over just shy of €30 million.

That’s a lot of stamps.

A hobby in decline? Not from where I’m standing.

Exhibiting Latin America…from Denver to Stockholm (Part 1)

Rocky Mountain Stamp Show 2019
A sea of frames at the RMSS. Note Michael Bloom’s Guatemala and Enrique Trigueros’ Mexico in the foreground

A significant proportion of philatelic clubs and societies are inevitably based ‘in country’, supporting the local collector base and promoting the philately of the nation.

There are, however, numerous societies around the world that are based thousands of miles away from the focus country, many with members who have never reached the shores of the country to which they devote their collecting attention.

Although nearly every Latin American country has its own locally based society, some countries have supporting philatelic organisations based elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’, in this instance, effectively means the US.

There are a few non-US based societies such as ArGe-Brasilien in Germany and the pan-Latin American ELASCA based in the Netherlands but, in general, the United States is the focal point for English speaking collectors of Central and South America.

The Rocky Mountain Stamp Show

Unusually, four of those societies congregated in one location over 23rd-26th May , cementing the Latin American theme of the 2019 Rocky Mountain Stamp Show.

I wouldn’t normally trek out to a regional US show but the RMSS was an exception. This annual event has, for the past few years, developed an innovative method of attracting a wider than average audience and bringing collectors together from beyond the shores of the United States.

Each event has a theme and this year’s theme was Latin America. With a specific focus behind the show, collectors who otherwise may not attend, dealers who may not otherwise take a stand and exhibitors who otherwise may not display, all have a reason for being there.

It also has the added attraction of a dedicated (and extensive) philatelic library that was open for business throughout much of the event. The largest library in the US after the APRL in Bellefonte, I’m led to believe, with over 14,000 books.

Five societies in attendance

Denver thus played host to the Mexico-Elmshurst Philatelic Society (MEPSI), the International Society of Guatemala Collectors, the Peru Philatelic Study Circle and The Nicaragua Study Group (not to mention representation from the Society for Costa Rica Collectors).

Rarely, do you get such a concentration of Latin American knowledge in one location outside the region itself.

The RMSS has hit upon the formula of devoting a full day before the show to a series of presentations from the invited society members, thus providing a good opportunity to share knowledge and network with like minded collectors. Eight talks covering a wide variety of geographical, historical and philatelic interest were well received to attending enthusiasts.

And to maximise the efforts made and share the subject matter more widely, the RMSS took the sensible step of recording each of the presentations. Expect to find them on You Tube within the next few weeks or so.

As to the exhibits: well, we were spoilt. Out of seventy-four exhibits, over thirty were from Latin America. It was a feast.

You can check out the award winners below.

2019 RMSS Palmares