Israel Stamp Reviews

Hardly a day goes by when one of the two main Israeli stamp collecting groups on Facebook does not see a message posted by a new member asking what to do with a deceased relative's stamp collection or sharing photos of a collection to solicit assessments of its worth. The responses to these messages typically range from silent disregard to curt replies a-la "worthless" and "garbage" to scornful rebukes. When Gal Rotem decided to sell his grandfather's collection, one look at the reality on Facebook was enough to convince him he needed to approach the situation differently if he were to have any hope of his collection getting noticed and being taken seriously. The end result was Ruvikrotem.com , a website registered with the goal of showcasing Grandpa Ruvik's 40-album collection and maximizing its value to potential buyers. But as Gal's involvement in digitizing his grandfather's collection grew, so did his fascination with it. The website ...

Nicole Mowbray, The Guardian Is the popularity of stamp collecting in decline or on the rise? This was the question explored in a recent article by Nicole Mowbray in The Guardian ( "Post modern: why millennials have fallen in love with stamp collecting," 11 April 2020). Mowbray's conclusion, based on interviews with five individuals between the ages of 29 and 37 active in the United Kingdom's philatelic scene, was that the popularity of stamp collecting is on the rise. Is her analysis an accurate reflection of reality or does closer scrutiny reveal it to be a product of wishful thinking? "Year of the Ox" stamp ( China Post , 2009) Among stamp collectors there are two attitudes regarding philately's future. To frame the debate in Wall Street terms, the bulls believe stamp collecting experienced a decline in popularity for an extended period but has bottomed out and is now in a definite uptrend; the bears , on the other hand, believe that eve...

The digital revolution of the 1990s introduced an array of challenges to stamp collecting that the hobby is still grappling with today. In particular, email's displacement of snail mail is universally regarded as the original sin from which all subsequent evils flowed. As snail mail, once the primary gateway into the hobby of stamp collecting, slipped further and further into obsolescence in inverse correlation to email's rise, a generation was born into a reality where the very notion of what a stamp is was already fading into obscurity. In the larger context of collecting generally, snail mail's decline was but one early symptom of the shift undergone in our emotional attachment patterns from physical property to digital property. Whereas prior to the digital revolution memories were preserved in physical form and it was fundamentally the physical form that was valued, the new paradigm sees less and less value in the accumulation of physical mementos when their digit...