I’ve lost count of the articles I’ve read over the years discussing philately’s future. Not to mention the letters submitted to magazines and journals, invariably bemoaning the purported decline in interest in stamp collecting. The arguments follow a familiar pattern and tend to focus on two well-worn themes… One: children don’t collect stamps anymore so […]
Analysis
Which country has the world’s worst postal service?
Which countries should you avoid shipping to? Let’s say you put a few items up for auction on eBay and one lucky winner has an address in Haiti. Would you post it using regular mail? If you’d just read the Universal Postal Union’s annual report on the global ranking of postal services around the world, […]
Collect Brazil? You probably need this…
Pre-internet, collectors tended to be far more reliant – dependent even – on the catalogue that was written in their own language. Buying and selling was limited to the relationships with dealers you knew, and the auctions you attended were those nearer to home. I’m generalising but you get the picture. Move on to the […]
South American stamps continue to appreciate in value
“While stamp prices of Europe and North American countries have shown significant weakness over the last five years, South American countries are showing continued appreciation with little or no price erosion during that time”. So says Richard Lehmann in this month’s ‘American Stamp Dealer and Collector’ magazine. Lehmann is the founder of StampFinder (www.stampfinder.com) and […]
And the second most expensive Latin American country to collect is…Honduras. And the least expensive? Guatemala. Debate!
Back in 2000, a Canadian Gentleman by the name of Michel Bégin compiled a database entitled “The Most Affordable Classic Stamps to Collect” and published his findings on the web. Clearly a man with time on his hands, he manually ploughed through the entire Scott 1840 – 1940 Specialized Catalogue and sorted each country’s listings […]