philb

11 Nov 2016
02:48:19pm

The people in our stamp club are pretty decent folks..if they have something philatelic they no longer need they bring it in to auction at a VERY reasonable starting bid. Last night i won a Honduras collection with 206 steiner pages in plastic sleeves,a Staples 2 inch binder that usually costs 14 dollars alone and a couple of hundred stamps for the great sum of Seven dollars. Heres the rub, the stamps of Central America are fairly easy to find from the 19th century to around 1969...i do not know why but after that they seem to dry up or are much harder to find(at least in used condition). Same with my Guatemala stamps...tons of stuff from 1880s through the airmails of the 1950s .I realize the typical Central American citizen is not a big letter writer..still there should be used stamps around somewhere.

 
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ikeyPikey

11 Nov 2016
06:56:25pm

re: The paradox of Central American stamps

I think that the only place to find contemporary(*) GPU (Genuinely Postally Used) Central American stamps is in a dealer's dollar cover box, or a suitable bulk covers lot at auction.

And I'm thinking that, for you & I, post-1969 is 'contemporary'.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

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re: The paradox of Central American stamps

Doesn't matter, Phil. You're not talking about any stamps specifically anyway.

But, to your point... It is difficult to find any newer stamps postally used. The further we keep going in the years, the less that stamps are being used for postage. It is sort of a regression back to the stampless cover days where postal clerks would write the postage paid in the corner of the envelope, and applied a town cancel. If you figure that now with machines, the clerks print a meter instead of writing the postage amount paid.

For Central American stamps, it is difficult to find many stamps from all years from many of those countries. Supplies just are not around for collectors, despite low values that are not a true indicator of the availability of those stamps. Try to ask approval dealers t send you approvals from Central America. They will tell you that they don't have any, or they just have only a few. Single country sales book from the American Philatelic Society Sales Circuits are hard to find too. If demand for those countries ever does tart to seriously grow, the values of many of those stamps will sky rocket.

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