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 […]
Philatelic Societies
London 2022…from a Latin American perspective
London stages an International once every decade but in the case of London 2022 it was a twelve year wait. In common with so many other shows, the tribulations of the past two years led to the inevitable postponements. This time, the organisers were going to delay no more. And rightly so. After a slowish […]
Latin American Philately Zooms Forward (Updated February 2023)
The article below was originally written in the midst of the COVID pandemic during May 2020. Mi Oficina has gone from strength to strength and has since held over five-hundred presentations, all of them published on their YouTube channel. The majority of videos include a link to a downloadable pdf of the presentation. The presentations […]
Introducing ELASCA – The European Latin American Stamp Collector Association
Most Latin American countries have their own specialized society but what if your tastes are broader and you want to encompass the region as a whole? Regional societies and journals have thrived in the past, notably The Mainsheet from the UK-based Spanish Main Society. In the US, the Latin America Philatelic Society was active from […]
The Collector | 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 […]
Exhibiting Latin America…from Denver to Stockholm (Part 1)
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 […]
Philatelic Societies – a review
I’ve recently updated the Resources pages. Part of this exercise was to revisit links to philatelic societies and investigate others that I wasn’t so familiar with. In reviewing so many sites in a relatively short space of time, you quickly get a feel for what seems to separate the well-organised societies from those that ‘could […]