1851 to 1979 Minkus Stamp Album - US, Aden to Biafra

lot/1851 to 1979 minkus stamp album us aden to biafra LgGJyrh 633313342 / Price history

lot/1851 to 1979 minkus stamp album us aden to biafra LgGJyrh 633313342

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lot/1851 to 1979 minkus stamp album us aden to biafra LgGJyrh 633313342

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1851 to 1979 Minkus Stamp Album - US, Aden to Biafra

Worldwide, United States and Foreign Postal Issues. A single-volume worldwide collection containing the postage of the United States followed by the alphabet from Aden to Biafra, the stamps dating from 1851 to 1979, mint and used together, mounted across the printed leaves of Volume I of the Supreme Global Stamp Album. The album is the 1966 edition edited by George A. Tlamsa and published by Minkus Publications of West 32nd Street, New York, issued at 1,312 pages with spaces for 43,900 stamps, 28,600 engraved illustrations, catalogue numbers keyed to the Minkus New World Wide Stamp Catalog, and a brisk geography lesson standing at the head of every country. Its title page calls itself the most complete three-volume set of albums ever published anywhere and an unrivalled source of fun and knowledge, then promises supplements annually, which is where the trouble and the interest begin. This is that first volume alone, bound in blind-stamped black boards with gilt-tooled spine and slipcase, its printed spaces filled where the collector could fill them and left open where he could not. The American section, which the publisher placed ahead of the alphabet, walks the long corridor of the Bank Note era. National Bank Note printings of 1870 and 1871 give way to the Continental contract of 1873 and its secret marks, those minute crescents, dashes and thickened ribbons by which one printer initialed another's dies and by which the collector still earns the use of a magnifier. Softer American Bank Note papers follow for 1879 to 1888, then the small Bank Notes of 1890, the Bureau triangles of 1894, and the watermarked sheets whose double-lined letters were spaced so that every stamp caught some fragment of U S P S. Farther on come the Prominent Americans, where Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, Thomas Paine and Eugene O'Neill share one page in a democracy no legislature could have assembled, with coils and the flag definitives of the Nixon years trailing behind them. Then the alphabet, and the world it recorded. Bavaria musters a full parade of Ludwig III in profile, climbing the denominations to the great wreathed marks, before the same plates return overprinted Volksstaat Bayern in 1919, a kingdom demoted to a people's state by ink alone, the whole postal franchise absorbed into the Reichspost shortly after. Algeria answers with the French issues of 1945 to 1948: Marianne and the Iris type overprinted for the colony, the Liberation of Corsica design conscripted into North African service, semipostals raising funds under the banner of Solidarite Algerienne, and a squadron of airmails whose aerial panoramas made the century's quiet boast that the mail now looked down on the land it crossed. Between these lie the A and B countries in their multitude, colonies, protectorates, mandates and republics, many of them since renamed and some since vanished. What distinguishes the volume is that it outgrew itself. The printed range ends at Gilbert and Ellice, yet this binder halts at Biafra, because the collector kept buying the annual supplements and kept mounting until the added leaves swelled the book past its own promise. That the run should stop at Biafra is a fine accident of philately, a republic whose stamps argued in miniature for a sovereignty the world largely declined to grant, and which outlasted its own currency by mere months. Confronted with a spine that had begun to lie, the owner did what no publisher would have sanctioned: he ran a strip of tape through a label maker and laid the corrected range over the gilt. A working collection, then, and a quietly comic monument to the postwar American collector, convinced the world could be brought to order between two boards and bursting the boards in the course of proving it. Item # 199520

Estimate:£189.18

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