A few weeks back I wrote a blog post on an 1834 entire from Calcutta taking the curricle from Morpeth to Edinburgh. In it, I discuss how one needs to know the distances between the various towns the letter passed through in order to figure out the inland rate markings in Great Britain. Further, I…
Some years ago, while leafing through the auction catalogue of the George T. Turner Philatelic Library which was held in May 1981, I came across lot 3265 which was listed under the heading CURIOUSA. Its description read: SINGER, S. The People with the Calumny, 1908, one of the rarest philatelic pamphlets, details Singer’s and C.J….
Webb’s (Figure 1) The Philatelic and Postal History of Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports of China and Japan (PPHK) has been on my purchase short-list for some time now. A few days back I saw a reprint of book on eBay but it looked, well, different. I bid and managed to bag it. Having…
A few weeks back, Frank Walton RDP, was kind enough to alert me to the sale of his six-volume The De La Rue Collection (2014) at an Australian auction house – Abacus Auctions; he knew that I have been searching for the set. While I had placed an alarm to wake myself up early that…
More than a 100 years back, the best philatelic bibliography ever, Bibliotheca Lindesiana Vol VII: A Bibliography of the Writings General Special and Periodical forming the Literature of Philately or more popularly, ‘The Crawford Catalogue’, was published. Since then many libraries and private collectors (such as Dr. Stanley Bierman and Albert Kronenberg) have published bibliographies…
Since the earliest days of stamp collecting in the 1860s to date, there have been so many great philatelists that it is almost impossible to choose the GOAT – greatest of all time. However it is certain that Robson Lowe (1905 – 1997) would find his name in any potential voter’s top three list. Auctioneer,…
Arthur Hind was arguably 20th century’s greatest stamp collector. He was to the second and third decade of the century what Philippe De Ferrari and Thomas K. Tapling were to the final two of the previous one. Amongst his prized possessions were the British Guiana 1c magenta, currently the most expensive item in philately last…
There is this very popular saying in Hindi: जब भगवन देता है चपड़ फाड् कर देता है। This literally translates as, “When God gives, he tears down the roof and gives.” The implied meaning is that when good things have to happen, they often happen together in quick succession (Of course it applies equally to…
After many suggestions and discussions (Figure 1), eight stalwarts (of the 49 invited) met exactly 150 years ago on 10 April 1869 (Figure 2) at 93, Great Russell Street and formed The Philatelic Society, London. These fore-bearers included: Sir Daniel Cooper, who was elected the President Frederick A. Philbrick, the Vice President W. Dudley Atlee,…
A few days back I bought, off eBay UK, a copy of Beech et al’s New Zealand and Dependencies: A Philatelic Bibliography. The edition was shown as bound in bright red cloth and thank to Brian Birch’s magnus opus, The Philatelic Bibliophile’s Companion, I immediately recognised it to be the British Philatelic Trust’s version –…
It was sometime in 2012/13 that I started collecting Indian mails going to foreign destinations in the pre-UPU period. The comprehensive book on the subject is Col. D. N. Martin and Col. Neil Blair’s Overseas Letter Postage from India 1854 to 1876 but that covers only routes and rates and not accountancy markings on, well,…
It is generally recognised that the first journal dealing exclusively with the topic of philatelic literature is The Philatelic Literature Collector (Figure 1) whose first (and only) issue came out in the Autumn of 1888. As the editorial in that first issue says: With this number, we present to our readers….a new venture in the…
