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Collectors usually want three things in a philatelic specialty-aesthetic appeal, acquisition challenge and affordability. Each collector defines these terms differently. But we all want the stamps that we collect to be intrinsically attractive. We want our ability to obtain them to equal our interest in the philatelic hunt and we want the cost of the collecting to match our financial ability to afford the stamps. On these criteria there are few more interesting major countries to collect than the Netherlands. The Dutch have always been among the world's most commercial nations and postal use throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has produced a large supply of material. The stamps are cleanly designed and well printed. And the country has had stable government and low inflation which kept postal rates the same for long periods of time, resulting in relatively few postal

When an organization is facing large deficits like the USPS is facing now, the temptation is to look at bold changes. Finding several billion dollars to balance the budget is never easy, but managers are often tempted to forget that a large forest is made up of many trees and that many small changes can have have a big impact on the bottom line. One idea for increasing postal revenues in a profitable area would be to increase the number of collectors buying new issue stamps to put away. Stamps that are bought and put in collections are almost pure profit for the USPS and it's hard to understand why they don't make more of an effort

Russian stamps of the 1930's have always fascinated me. They are beautiful and well designed with friendly, internationalist themes and yet they were issued by a vicious regime that was systematically exploiting its citizens and was highly militaristic in orientation. Another aggressive state of this period, Germany, at least was more honest about its goals and had a highly nationalistic stamp issuing policy. In the exaltation of the Volk and the Fatherland its easy to see the factors that led to WWII. But as George Orwell explained so well in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the pathological hypocrisy of the Soviet communist system