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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Though many might not agree with me, I consider ATM-stamps (which the Americans call Variable Rate Stamps or Variable Value stamps) as one of the best innovations in modern postage stamp production. Although stamp catalogs have got varying policies with inclusion of ATM-stamps (with Michel giving them full recognition, Scott listing only the US based stamps), they are real postage stamps. Whereas meters and labels are valid only by the licensed user from the specified location and on the date imprinted, the ATM-stamps behave just like postage stamps – buy once from any vending machine, use whenever and where-ever. With this entry I’ll be providing a simplified overview with one of the most common and popular area of them all – the German ATM-stamps.

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New books focusing on forgeries of common stamps don’t come out often, so when I saw Amazon Kindle listing of ‘Forgeries of common stamps after World War 1: Eastern Front, Balkans, Caucasus’ by P. Clark Souers for $11 I was immediately attracted to it, and few days later I added a copy of it to my Kindle reader.

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Jack of all trades, master of none holds very true with us worldwide collectors.  I got reminded on this when sorting up with small batch of New Zealand King George V stamps recently. Though I believed I had pretty good working knowledge on the stamps, I decided to re-read various catalogs at my disposal before digging any further, and I actually learned quite a lot new stuff while at it. The fun part is that all catalogs provided a slightly different angle for these stamps.

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Way back in year 2009 I wrote a seven part article series where I went through all the major storage alternatives for worldwide stamp collections, and estimated the approximate cost of each system when collecting the world from 1840 to date. Back then the lowest cost storage system was established with stock books, whereas using stock cards was four times more costly. Do these results still hold true or has the situation changed?

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