Nigerian Stamps and Postal History

In one of my earlier posts to this blog I wrote about the many misconceptions surrounding catalogue values and how they are often misused by collectors and dealers alike. In this post I wanted to share some of my thoughts as a dealer about the impact that catalogues have had on the hobby in general. On the plus side, catalogues serve several very useful functions: They help a collector to become aware of the scope of extant material available in a potential area of collecting interest as well is indicating to a collector the potential level of detail they can get into should they wish to. A collector can view catalogue listings to decide if an area they are potentially interested in collecting will provide enough scope to maintain their interest or not. So they are useful in helping a collector make educated decisions about where they want to concentrate their collecting efforts.  They provide information about stamps sufficient to give a collector a working knowledge of a p...

Overview Before I get into talking about the shades of colour found on the various Nigerian stamps, I thought it would be useful to address the subject of colour as it relates to philately in general. The issue of colour is perceived by philatelists to be highly subjective and individualistic, not to mention confusing. One of the biggest problems in the hobby is that terminology is used very loosely, with very specific words being used as though they are synonyms, when in reality they mean very different things. For example, a dark colour and a deep colour are not the same thing at all. Yet many collectors will use these terms interchangeably.  In addition, most listings in the standard postage stamp catalogues use words that are far too general to describe colour, such as "green", or they use culturally loaded terms like "Indian red" and "Pigeon Blood Pink", which are just about useless for identification unless you know what the exact colour looks like...

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the many ways that I feel stamp dealers provide value to the hobby. Since I wrote that post, I have encountered quite a lot of anti-dealer sentiment on Facebook groups and Facebook itself. The general tone of this sentiment is that the collectors feel that we are nothing more than greedy middlemen who drive the price of stamps up beyond what they are really worth. Their evidence to support this is threefold: 1. The latest deal they made with Mr. Fellowcollector half way around the world for the following stamp: The stamp of course is the 1908 Quebec Tercentenary Issue and has a catalogue price of $100 for fine. Well the collector has just purchased this one from Mr. Fellowcollector for $30, which shows that us dealers who are selling this same stamp for $65 are just a bunch of greedy people. 2. Their experience in purchasing collections from auction houses, in which they can buy collections of Canada or any country they want at 2...

I have just purchased the remaining correspondence of the International Youth Organization in Finland from a private collector in Finland. This remarkable correspondence consists of some 50,000 pieces of mail sent from small villages throughout Nigeria to the organization in Turku, Finland. A good percentage of these envelopes are registered frankings featuring many scarcer definitives and commemoratives and scarcer combinations of lower value stamps. I started purchasing this accumulation in stages three years ago when my intention was to study the postmarks, rates and usages for my own collection. To date, I had purchased about 20,000 of the covers from the period 1969-1985. The remaining 30,000 covers are from the period from about 1986 to the early 2000's. This covers the entire hyper-inflation period when the Kobo values became useless almost overnight and people were using 50 stamps to mail a letter. If you were ever looking for an opportunity to specialize in postal hist...

Today I wanted to share my thoughts for those of you non-stamp collectors about why I think stamp collecting is the most awesome hobby in the world.  I start by examining the purpose of most hobbies. Hobbies generally are a way for us to relax doing something that interests us without any standards and goals beyond those which we determine for ourselves. There are many different kinds of hobbies, but most fall into the following categories: 1. Hobbies that involve collecting something.  2. Hobbies that involve creating something. 3. Hobbies that involve experiencing something. In all cases, the hobby activity stimulates our senses - smell, sight, touch, hearing, as well as our exercising and engaging our minds. Most people find comfort in one of the above categories and occasionally one encounters individuals whose hobbies span all three. Most hobbies have a life cycle: 1. Dabbling 2. Increasing the intensity of interest and goal setting 3....

It has been said before that there is perhaps no substance on earth that is more valuable, in terms of its volume, than original stamp gum on classic stamps. Collectors will pay up to 1000% more for a stamp that has it, and more commonly 100-200%, than a stamp that lacks it. This of course has led to a thriving industry involving adding gum to stamps that lack it. In some cases, the re-gumming job is so good that it can fool a collector who is unfamiliar with the stamp issue at hand.  So how do you tell if a stamp has original gum or not? Kind of like fingerprints, stamp gum has its own unique appearance for each issue on which it appears. Fortunately, there tends to be some uniformity in the chemical composition and method of application of gum by specific printing firms, so understanding the characteristics of the gum they employed in production will prove to be invaluable to a collector who encounters an expert re-gumming job. It will also enable you to authenticate ...

Today's post is about a development within the hobby that I have found to be very damaging to the hobby in general and damaging to the long-term ability of dealers to service their collector market. That development has been the tendency by dealers and collectors to perceive modern stamps issued after 1945 as mere postage and to take the position that it is worth less than its face value. It is hard to be certain where it started, but I have a fairly strong hunch that it was started by dealers back in the day of brick-and-mortar retail stores. I can certainly understand why dealers at this time saw no harm in this practice: in their collective minds, they could not envision a time when demand would be sufficient to absorb the then colossal supply of mint stamps. Back in the 1970's and most of the 1980's, most of the industrialized countries in the world were issuing upwards of 30-50 million of each commemorative stamp, so the supply seemed endless. At the same time, ...