Israel Stamp Reviews

After Hebrew, English and Russian, the most popular language in my stamp collection is Armenian. There are a number of reasons for Armenian's popularity, but the main one has to do with my place of employment for the past eight years. This place has engendered an appreciation not only of the local Armenian families with whom I interact almost daily but of their homeland, their history, their culture -- and most recently, their stamps. If last month the oldest stamp in my collection was the 1927 "Zamenhof" from the U.S.S.R., this month that distinction has passed to four stamps dating back to 1922 from the Armenian S.S.R. The stamps are part of a series identified by Stefan Berger as the " Erivan pictorials " and, having been printed with postal intent but never surcharged for actual use as postage, correspond to the second of the series' three 1922 subsets. Where I acquired the stamps was at a weekly meeting of the Jerusalem Stamp Club. It was my secon...

1927 U.S.S.R. Esperanto stamp Sooner or later in the growth of every young stamp collector, there comes a time when he feels his collection will forever remain incomplete until he adds to it that storied philatelic ancestor from which all subsequent stamps are descended -- the Penny Black. This, however, is not the tale of how I acquired my first Penny Black -- mainly because I have not acquired a Penny Black yet, but also because the title above would not hold much interest to the reader if its referent were a stamp about which hundreds of articles have already been written. Instead, the oldest stamp in my collection as of now is one that was issued in 1927 by the U.S.S.R. It commemorates forty years since the creation of the Esperanto language and features an oval portrait of Esperanto's inventor, L.L. Zamenhof (1859-1917). Measuring 43.5x24 millimeters, the stamp is printed on thick paper, which has presumably helped it survive with no creases or other damage for almost...