The width of the black border on a mourning cover indicates how close the relationship was to the deceased and the depth of grief. Mourning covers were used throughout the world. They are still used, although rarely, today.
The number of different Scott numbers for the 1851 series 5-9, 13-16, 18-24, and 31-34 came from a group of dealers who were looking for more stamps for collectors to collect so they could sell more. After all, there were not very many different stamps yet in the 1860s.
In 1898, eleven proprietary drug companies, 10 in St. Louis, made a deal with the IRS to print their own proprietary tax stamps for use until the delayed federal tax stamps arrived. These came to be known as the St. Louis Provisionals. Want one? Get your checkbook out. Most of them have a five-figure value!
A murder mystery. In 1892, Gaston Leroux, a well-known Parisian collector at the time, was found murdered. It took detectives months to solve the case, but they did. The culprit was Hector Giroux. The motive? The 2-cent Hawaiian Missionary stamp. Today, 15 known on and off cover; off $250K and up, on $2.25M.
Two U.S. presidents were postmasters in their younger days. The first that most would know about is Abraham Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois. The second… Harry Truman in Grandview, Missouri.
The Pennsylvania Match Company, now the home of the APS, never did produce any private die proprietary (match) stamps.
They didn’t start producing matches until 1900. The law requiring the stamps was repealed in 1883.
When the first Scott catalog appeared in 1868, there were no catalog numbers assigned to the stamps. When then, 1887 (or was it). And the rest is history.
In 1898, eleven proprietary drug companies, 10 in St. Louis, made a deal with the IRS to print their own proprietary tax stamps for use until the delayed federal tax stamps arrived. These came to be known as the St. Louis Provisionals. Want one? Get your checkbook out. Most of them have a five-figure value!
Austria-Hungary was the first country to issue a postal card (Correspondenz-Karte) on October 1st, 1869. The U.S> didn’t issue a postal card until 1873.
We often talk about countries that were the first to issue a stamp of some type, but what about the last? The latest country to issue its first postage stamp is Sark, a dependency of the UK, on 27 August 2025.
