Post by rayb on Aug 4, 2014 15:52:34 GMT -5
There are a lot of platitudes in philately. I have little time for most of them. Many are deficient in usefulness,and a surprising number of them deficient in veracity. But one that I was told early in my collecting career I still believe is good advice: money spent on philatelic literature is NEVER wasted.
From that, you may gather that I have just bought another book. I have to confess – an electronic book. Even from this side of the Atlantic I could hear the scream of disgust from Mr Lee. And generally I am fully sympathetic. What I enjoy most about a real book is not the feel or smell of the paper; it is the fact you can lie in a bath for hours reading it with little danger of serious damage to the book, and negligible danger of electrocution to the reader.
But in this case, even if I could have found a hard-copy version, it would have cost me around £80 plus probably very heavy shipping from a far-away land. That is a lot to pay for a 90 year old catalogue, long ago duplicated by a more modern work (most of the relevant parts of which I already own), poorly illustrated, written in a language I can't read, about 95% of which deals with countries I don't collect. As it is, I paid almost £40 for the electronic copy and its transportation from Richard Hummel's shop in Germany.
The book is the 1925 edition of Siegfried Ascher's Die Grosser Ganzsachenkatalog – the predecessor of Higgins & Gage's World Postal Stationery Catalog. And I can hear the few of you who are still awake asking two questions.
Why did I buy it? I do not begrudge time spent doing philatelic research. But I do begrudge time spent reinventing the wheel. I am looking forward to doing some work on Montenegro – and subsequently Serbia. In particular I am interested in finding out the way(s) that the reply cards of these two states were set up by the printers. Of this H&G say nothing. But the very first sentence of their Montenegro listing states (ungrammatically, but I leave it intact): 'The early cards of Montenegro have many varieties in printing errors and settings that we refer the specialist to the Ascher catalogue.'
Was it worth it? I have to confess that I was worried about investing so much money on what might be a pig in a poke. Having seen it, albeit only for an afternoon, I can see that my queries about the reply cards have been addressed; whether they have been fully solved awaits a long session between the book and my two associates Herr Langenscheidt Worterbuch and Professor Google-Translate.
Already I have noticed the vast amount of information under Austria and Hungary on bilingual stationery before WW1 – German/Slovenian and Hungarian/Croatian: both technically outside my area of collecting, but I will have to have determination like steel if I am not to at least dip my toe into this area.
The software, for which I had little expectation given the difficulty of scanning ink of that age, in fact is very good: the Optical Character Recognition is not 100% accurate, but not too far off.
So would I recommend it to all those of you who collect early postal stationery of your particular cherished country (which I hope is all of you!)? Yes. In no way do I find myself regretting the £40 worth of stamps and covers I had to forego to buy it.
And all together now - money spent on philatelic literature is NEVER wasted.
From that, you may gather that I have just bought another book. I have to confess – an electronic book. Even from this side of the Atlantic I could hear the scream of disgust from Mr Lee. And generally I am fully sympathetic. What I enjoy most about a real book is not the feel or smell of the paper; it is the fact you can lie in a bath for hours reading it with little danger of serious damage to the book, and negligible danger of electrocution to the reader.
But in this case, even if I could have found a hard-copy version, it would have cost me around £80 plus probably very heavy shipping from a far-away land. That is a lot to pay for a 90 year old catalogue, long ago duplicated by a more modern work (most of the relevant parts of which I already own), poorly illustrated, written in a language I can't read, about 95% of which deals with countries I don't collect. As it is, I paid almost £40 for the electronic copy and its transportation from Richard Hummel's shop in Germany.
The book is the 1925 edition of Siegfried Ascher's Die Grosser Ganzsachenkatalog – the predecessor of Higgins & Gage's World Postal Stationery Catalog. And I can hear the few of you who are still awake asking two questions.
Why did I buy it? I do not begrudge time spent doing philatelic research. But I do begrudge time spent reinventing the wheel. I am looking forward to doing some work on Montenegro – and subsequently Serbia. In particular I am interested in finding out the way(s) that the reply cards of these two states were set up by the printers. Of this H&G say nothing. But the very first sentence of their Montenegro listing states (ungrammatically, but I leave it intact): 'The early cards of Montenegro have many varieties in printing errors and settings that we refer the specialist to the Ascher catalogue.'
Was it worth it? I have to confess that I was worried about investing so much money on what might be a pig in a poke. Having seen it, albeit only for an afternoon, I can see that my queries about the reply cards have been addressed; whether they have been fully solved awaits a long session between the book and my two associates Herr Langenscheidt Worterbuch and Professor Google-Translate.
Already I have noticed the vast amount of information under Austria and Hungary on bilingual stationery before WW1 – German/Slovenian and Hungarian/Croatian: both technically outside my area of collecting, but I will have to have determination like steel if I am not to at least dip my toe into this area.
The software, for which I had little expectation given the difficulty of scanning ink of that age, in fact is very good: the Optical Character Recognition is not 100% accurate, but not too far off.
So would I recommend it to all those of you who collect early postal stationery of your particular cherished country (which I hope is all of you!)? Yes. In no way do I find myself regretting the £40 worth of stamps and covers I had to forego to buy it.
And all together now - money spent on philatelic literature is NEVER wasted.
