One of the interesting differences between various worldwide stamp catalogs is how differently they classify and list obligatory postal tax stamps. For example Michel and Yvert assign major numbers to all Barcelona City Council (Ayuntamiento de Barcelona) postal tax stamps, whereas Scott and Stanley Gibbons bypass them with a note ‘used on correspondence purely for the purpose of raising local revenue and therefore listing is omitted’.

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I still remember how nervous I was when I signed up with eBay in the early 2000s. Despite I had been buying (and selling) actively at domestic stamp auctions for about a decade, doing things globally was like any first time. I was largely going with the flow and following my instincts. Needless to say a lot of trial and error has occurred in these 15 years, but I could not imagine a world otherwise , and these days about 75% of my stamp budget goes to various online dealers and auction houses around the globe. I think many worldwide stamp collectors have experienced a somewhat similar globalization of sources in recent decades, but I also know that some are still ‘stuck’ with the old way of buying locally only. Hopefully this post will provide some food for the thought as well as encouragement to step outside the local pool of suppliers. And if nothing more, this will hopefully provide non-European collectors a different kind of perspective what the life of collector is alike inside EU.

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Howdy ho all ye stamp lovers. It is time for another month of beautiful stamps around the world. With great interest I am looking forward whether or not my collection reaches the landmark of 110,000 stamps this month. Though I am only 136 stamps away from reaching this milestone, July has been traditionally a somewhat slow stamping month for me. It is summer and holidays, and life has got plenty of other stuff besides stamps (oh the blasphemy of it).

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As I was about to start typing this week’s blog post, I heard Crash Boom Bang (or more precisely it was a series of sounds that reminded of R2-D2 bleeping in distress) from my computer. My trusted workhorse of 7 years, a custom built Dell Latitude E6510 laptop, had just experienced a heat stroke due to which all the eight cores of it were forced to emergency shutdown. As I counted the minutes for the machine to cool down a bit before an attempt to reboot, a cold sweat poured all over my front head. Replacing the main system is every geeks worst nightmare. Though I do have multiple backups of my precious data and a number of systems that I can use for random online access and light work, there is only one system that has got ALL the pieces in place. It could take several weeks for a proper replacement machine to arrive, and even more time tinkering and tweaking the system to my liking. So I felt very worried.

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Hot showers are legendary for producing some of the best thinking in the world, and few times I have found myself pondering what keeps me motivated with stamps and collecting. In the end spending a lion’s share of ones life in collecting bits of paper that somebody used to lick does not sound as the smartest thing to do. Henry David Thoreau once wrote ‘Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not the fish they are after’. This holds true for stamps as well.

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Few nights back my missus and I went to nearest big city for some shopping. It was about one hour drive and while at it we listened to some talk radio. At first I didn’t put much weight to contents of the radio show, but when I found out it was all about letter writing in the early 19th century I started listening more carefully to story being told.

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For the past week I’ve been trying to make heads and tales out of French postage due stamps of 1881/1892 (aka. ‘type Duval noir’) and their colored successors of 1884/1941 (just ‘type Duval’). The main problem lies with the unfortunate fact that though many of the issues are somewhat common and low value,  about 25% of the issues catalog more than 100€. Needless to say this has attracted stamp forgers such Fournier to try their luck with these.

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I’m usually not attracted by uncancelled items, but the below Hamburg 1864 2½ schilling stamp caught my interest since stamps of Hamburg are somewhat rarely seen. From first looks it appears as Michel #14  (Scott 23) with one clear exception: the color of the stamp is brownish khaki instead of the standard green-ish color. The starting situation in itself poses two mind-intriguing questions.  First, is the stamp genuine or not?  And second, if it is genuine, then what could have caused the color change?

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As the summer season is once again upon and I’ve got a bit more time for the stamps in months ahead, I’m trying out some new things for the SCB.  In addition of the weekly blog entry,  for the next two to three months I will be sharing some ‘beautiful’ stamp from my collection.  These items will come through as I add new items or otherwise work with my collection, so any updates to this topic will appear irregularly. There will be no ‘deep’ philatelic knowledge on this page, just scans of stamps I fancy and maybe a random commentary about them. Whether or not this becomes a regular feature depends entirely on your feedback.  As always, hope you enjoy the stamp extravaganza ahead.

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Recently I ordered a box of new stock books from a clearance sale, and as a freebie I received two copies of LAPE Finland Concice Stamp Catalogue 2015. For a dealer out-of-date copies such as these they may be dead inventory, but as a collector I definitely love a cheap (or as in this case free) upgrade. Retail price of LAPE Concice has been about 20€ several years, but as the catalog comes out annually, older copies are somewhat easily available and sell for pittance locally. Usually the highest cost of obtaining Finnish catalogs is not the price of book itself, but postage and delivery costs.

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