From the category archives:

Postage Stamp Stories

Collecting St. Pierre Miquelon Stamps

January 5, 2010

St. Pierre Miquelon… for stamp collectors it offers a heritage of bootleggers, Nazi sympathizers and fascinating postage stamps.
Virtually all of the whiskey that bootleggers smuggled into America’s east coast ports from “Rumrunner’s Row” spent time in warehouses on a small group of islands located off Newfoundland.  A little known outpost of the French Empire found [...]

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A Historic Stamp Auction in Cairo

January 3, 2010

In February, 1954 many of the world’s stamp dealers converged on Cairo.  The military government which had ousted King Farouk two years earlier had retained the London firm of H.R. Harmer to auction off his extensive postage stamp holdings.
While the frequently ill-mannered Farouk caroused in Europe, his massive holdings of stamps were put on the [...]

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The “Klaipeda” Overprint

January 1, 2010

You may have a tough time identifying this stamp.  Don’t feel badly,  because following World War I the Allied Powers had a tough time figuring out what to do with the country it comes from.

The stamp is from Memel, originally part of Prussia but heavily Lithuanian.
Following the war,  Memel was detached from Germany and administered [...]

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