General Philately

Forthcoming auctions and initiatives in the hobby

Granadine Confederation 1859 1 Peso Carmine Block of 15, to be auctioned by Siegel on 30th September (est. $3k-$4k) — Granadine Confederation 1859 1 Peso Carmine Block of 15, to be auctioned by Siegel on 30th September (est. $3000-$4000)

There have been a few notable initiatives in the wider stamp world in the past few weeks but let’s start with the auctions.

If you are kept up to speed with auction email alerts or read the monthly philatelic press, then it won’t have escaped your attention that the late Leo Malz collections of Central and South America are coming to the market.

Kelleher have the sale primed for October 7^th.

‘Collections’ is truly the operative word here. Yes, there are a number of star pieces extracted from the larger lots, but the emphasis is very much on some substantial accumulations of harder-to-find material.

Haiti alone warrants 145 lots, some of significant size and depth with proofs and varieties to the fore.

Haiti 1904 Nord Alexis 20c orange tête-bêche pair. From the Leo Malz auction, estimate $750-$1000

Every one of the twenty Latin American republics is represented in some shape or form, bar Mexico. Given its wide scope, the sale will act as a good market bellwether.

Up at the more rarefied end, Siegel are auctioning the Gordon John collection of Uruguay and Colombia in their 29^th September sale.

It’s a very focused sale with only two issues represented: the 1859 first issue of Colombia and the 1859/60 Uruguay ‘suns’. Not much there for the bargain hunter but quality material with a number of high provenance rarities.

Uruguay 1860 60c Chocolate Brown. Heavily undercatalogued and modestly estimated by Siegel at $200-$300

Later in the year, expect to see yet another significant holding from the Bill Byerley Nicaragua collection come to market via HR Harmer. This is the third tranche of this huge collection and is expected to go to auction in December.

Virtual Stampex International

Kelleher and Siegel are just two of the exhibitors that have signed up to take part in what is being billed as the first virtual stamp show: Stampex International.

The APS also laid claim to launching the first virtual show with a successful series of events that ran from 17^th-22^nd August but the Stampex initiative takes it up another level.

By taking advantage of the vfairs interactive platform, the idea is to attempt to get as close to the real thing, without leaving home.

Without any travel or accommodation costs, the concept has been quickly embraced by the international philatelic trade.

Amongst 100+ exhibitors, notable stand holders include Cherrystone, Kohler, David Feldman, Spink, Corinphila, Stanley Gibbons…

Even eBay have a stand, which must indicate that the category has some level of importance within their wider business. Possibly to promote Stamp Market Index which is now getting heavily promoted on the eBay website.

Internationals always have an understandable home bias with only the better funded exhibitors tending to cross borders. It will be interesting to see whether this remains a COVID inspired one-off or whether it is the start of developing a truly global event platform for the hobby.

Stampex takes place from 1^st-3^rd October at www. stampex.vfairs.com.

The virtual auditorium. That's quite an audience for a stamp talk! — The virtual auditorium. That’s quite an audience for a philatelic talk!

For a sneak preview of the show in action, you can get a good idea by watching the recent interview with the Philatelic Trader’s Society on the new Conversations with Philatelists YouTube channel.

Conversations with Philatelists

Hosted by Charles Epting (HR Harmer) and Michael Cortese (Noble Spirit), this initiative has made quick progress with interviews under the belt from Gary Loew, Wayne Youngblood, Wade Saadi and Dana Guyer amongst others.

Be good to see how this develops.

Lastly, I cannot remember the number of articles I must have read over the years on ‘the state of the hobby’.

It’s been a staple topic of philatelic writers over the decades with forecasts from everything from complete obliteration through to a golden renaissance and all points in-between.

However, the best summary I have read in a long while comes from Colin Fraser in the September 2020 edition of Flash, the journal of the Federation Internationale de Philatelie.

Entitled ‘Can a pandemic finally change the world of philately?’, it deserves a wider audience than the circulation of Flash. You can download a copy below (page 27 onwards).

FIP Flash September 2020 Download

It’s a thought provoking read and I commend it to you.

Original ABNC steel plates come to market

So you’ve acquired a nice selection of plate proofs and a few die proofs to enhance your collection. Now how about an original steel plate as the cherry on the cake?

Over one thousand of the American Bank Note Company original, engraved printing plates have recently come to market, offering an unusual opportunity to own the unique plate from which your chosen stamp originated.

And many of these plates are from Latin America.

Most of the plates date from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and contain many engraved images that will be familiar to Latin America collectors.

Frames, vignettes, intermediate and experimental plates are all represented, along with the finished engravings for both post and revenue stamps.

The original archive was purchased in 2005 and it appears there have been some subsequent small sales since but this holding represents the bulk of the collection.

Additionally, there are plates from a few of the other countries where ABNC made sales, together with a number of US fiscals and cinderellas.

Interestingly, there are also a number of Seebeck issues amongst the collection of plates, with the printing work being undertaken by the Hamilton Bank Note Company.

Every one of the twenty republics is included in the sale; there wasn’t a single country in Latin America that ABNC had not got onto its order books in some form or other.

The collection is being marketed by numismatic dealers David Lawrence and you can view or make purchases through their website at www.davidlawrence.com. There is also an auction planned later this month for a few of the plates but most are being sold at $1500 a piece.

Quite how best to display (mount?!) your new treasure? That, I’m not too sure.

A few more images below to whet the appetite…

$800,000+ Venezuela auction kicks off 2020

Venezuela 1859 1 Real blue, rejoined strip of nine. The largest known mint strip in private hands. Low estimate €7500

Auction trends in 2020 and a fabulous collection of Venezuela comes to market

Like so many industries around us, the philatelic auction business has gone into hibernation mode.

The inability for people to gather means the physical perusing of auction lots is not going to happen for a good while yet. Most of the major houses have postponed their spring sales until later in the year. Some of the revised dates look hugely ambitious to me.

I’m not convinced that the pandemic is going to rapidly disappear and things are going to get back to normal all that quickly…

And even when lockdowns are universally lifted, are – let us be honest – predominantly older men going to want to congregate en masse in the close confines of an auction environment?

Possibly not until a freely available vaccine gives one the confidence to mingle with impunity.

Online auctions take centre stage in 2020

Fortunately, we have the benefit of online bidding to fall back on and unless healthy cash balances and patient sellers allow it, I can see many of 2020’s auctions ending up being online only affairs.

Many houses had juicy inventories backed up for the now postponed London 2020 event and sellers will have been waiting patiently, so the pressure will be on from some to either go to market online only or pull their lots for another day, farther into the future.

With good descriptions and clear images, there is no reason why singles and sets shouldn’t do just as well as if the auction were still live.

Collections though, are going to demand more of the auction house.

Buying blind on a collection is always going to be a gamble. This then puts much more emphasis on photographs and spending the time to create many more images for album sales.

More work for the auction house but future sellers are going to be keen to align with auctioneers that can show off their collections in the best light over an internet connection.

Venezuela 1861 cover with 1 Real blue and Half Real orange affixed. One of only two covers of this bicolour franking recorded. Low estimate €3000.

High ticket Venezuela at Spink

Interestingly, Spink have bucked the trend by not postponing and have a phenomenal holding of Venezuela coming to market on 29th April (The “Lugano” Collection).

The last meaningful sale of Venezuela we’ve seen was the Brack auction of 2016. However, this ‘behind closed doors’ sale is solely focused on the 1859-62 first issue. It contains many of the key items of early Venezuelan philately and will need very deep pockets for the high ticket rarities.

Aggregated bid estimates come in at $800,000 plus – and that’s the low estimate. Star billing goes to the 1859 Medio Real Red Error of Colour, billed as ‘The Most Important Item of Venezuela Philately’ at a low estimate of €200,000.

An online only sale of early Venezuela that nets over one million dollars? Let’s see!

Venezuela 1861-62 Half Real orange, marginal block of eight. Low estimate of €2,500

Byerley and Moorhouse auctions postponed

Two important postponed sales to keep an eye on…

Firstly, Part II of the vast Bill Byerley collection of Nicaragua will be offered by Harmers on June 16th. Only eight weeks away so watch to see whether this doesn’t get another postponement.

Secondly, the third part of the late Brian Moorhouse’s dealer stock is being auctioned by Corinphila; now delayed until early September. No doubt this will contain a smorgasbord of Latin American delights from across the continent.

In the meanwhile, as the world self-isolates and gorges on screen time, perhaps philately may be reinvigorated by a house bound, inquisitive audience with a newly found desire to engage with the world through those little bits of coloured paper.

The Scott Classic Specialized Catalogue: a review

The Alexandria ‘Blue Boy’ on the cover of the 2020 edition changed hands last year for $1,000,000 at H. R. Harmer

Once upon a time, Stanley Gibbons’ twin volume South America and Central America catalogues were my daily reference tools.

They are still powerful weapons in the Latin America collector’s armoury but for a number of years, the Scott Classic Specialized has been my ‘go to’ first port of call.

Gibbons hasn’t updated the aforementioned volumes for many years now (see this post on SG Part 20 )…and it doesn’t look like they will.

On the other hand, Scott has a continual programme of annual incremental updating.

Scott’s coverage of ‘on cover’ pricing is also a useful differentiator. It tends to be somewhat haphazard but, where applied, can help illustrate some of the significant premiums for ‘on cover’ examples, particularly the early issues.

Not that I’m suggesting you necessarily need to replace your copy every year (particularly if you only collect one or a handful of countries) but if you’ve not updated for a while, perhaps the start of a new decade is as good a time as any.

With this in mind, I thought I would compare how the recently issued 2020 edition stacks up against an earlier copy from five years ago.

How much changes from year to year?

Just how much has changed? Is it really worth shelling out $125 (plus shipping) when the cash could be put towards adding something interesting to your collection?

As prospective catalogue buyers, we are primarily interested in two categories of information:

What price increases or decreases have occurred since I last bought my catalogue?
What new information has been added to help me with my collection?

It would, of course, make that decision so much easier if it were clearly apparent what changes had occurred between the years. A subtle highlight, perhaps, to show where prices have changed or new data had been included?

Alas, it isn’t going to happen.

The bottom line is that the number of changes is relatively minimal in comparison to the overall number of listings. Updating catalogues is a manual process, gleaned from the efforts of contributing correspondents and a few thorough country reviews.

You’d need an army of researchers to properly review each edition. Even with new tools to hand such as Noble Spirit’s Stamp Market Index (see here), it still takes case by case decisions to commit to changes.

What does this mean for Latin America collectors?

I don’t have the patience to look at each country’s listing in minute detail but I have done a broad sweep, comparing 2015 with 2020 side by side.

With five years between them, how much has changed…?

These are some of the things I noticed:

In Argentina, a significant expansion of the 1864-67 Rivadavia listings; up from nineteen stamps and varieties to fifty entries, primarily being driven by paper types and shades.

In Chile there are now enlarged illustrations showing the differences in the 1894 Columbus types. New additions are found in the 1880-1913 ‘AR’ Postal Fiscals.

Similar to Chile, image enlargements are also spotted in a couple of examples for the Dominican Republic.

There are plenty more future opportunities to improve listings across the catalogue by visually illustrating the differences between types, rather than relying on a description.

In Colombian states, the values were extensively revised in 2019.

Something odd has happened to Haiti with a mass breakout of never-hinged pricing. Every stamp from Scott 1 onwards appears to now be priced for MNH as well as regular mint.

MNH prices now exist for every Haitian stamp to 1940.

Will we see this protocol copied across to other countries? Is it a beneficial development or does it just give the regummers an extra incentive?

Haiti is an inexpensive country to collect and there ain’t much to be make from uplifting a hinged 25c stamp to an unmounted 75c. But apply the same principles to Brazil or Mexico and the temptation will be there.

Venezuela has been shown a disproportionate but very welcome amount of attention in recent years with the inclusion of the 1900-1922 Postal Fiscals. Long since recognised in Gibbons, these sixty-seven new entries had kept many Scott users mystified for a long while.

In 2020, Venezuela has yet again been shown the love with over two pages of new additions dedicated to the Gobierno Nacional perforated officials. This bumps up the number of Venezuela entries by a further one hundred and fifty-six listings.

The GN perforations can be found upright, inverted or sideways

Worth checking any stocks you may have as some of these sets have been allocated significant values. For example, the 1937 Resellado overprint Air Post set comes in at $850 in mint condition.

It’s fair to say that the number of price changes, either up or down, is minimal across the board. A few tweaks and exceptions here or there but for all intents and purposes, values remain broadly static.

That isn’t to say that market prices remain static. The reality is that it is just not feasible to check, review and revise tens of thousands of price points every year without a large team of researchers or some form of dynamic updating. Or even every five years.

And bear in mind, of course, that I’ve only taken a cursory glance at twenty countries. There will certainly be some substantial changes to countries from other regions of the world.

The Scott Classic Specialized is a flawed catalogue. As is every other catalogue, from any other publisher that has come before it.

But despite any limitations it is the best of its kind, improves each year and is a perfect jumping off point from which to dig deeper.

For me, it’s an essential tool.

eBay disrupts catalogue publishing with 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 150^th 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

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.