Nigerian Stamps and Postal History

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...