What Is Your Favorite Stamp Book

to learn about stamps, which ones do you consider most usefull?
My main intrest area would be history, cancels, covers etc before 1920.

Since you posted in the U. S.Classic thread, I assume that you're interest in 19th Century United States stamps. I'd recommend Lester Brookmamn's three volume work, United States Stamps of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1962. Not the easiest to find, but a great starting place for any collector wanting to go beyond the catalog.

The three volumes of Lester Brookman's outstanding work The United State Stamps of the Nineteenth Century may be downloaded ( at no cost ) from the website of the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society, as well as many other classic volumes of US philatelic litature at this web page?

http://www.uspcs.org/resource-cente...nic-library/

For early 20th century U.S., Siegel has made available The United States Postage Stamps of the Twentieth Century by Johl:

http://www.siegelauctions.com/enc/p...hl_Vol_1.pdf
http://www.siegelauctions.com/enc/p...hl_Vol_2.pdf
http://www.siegelauctions.com/enc/p...hl_Vol_3.pdf
http://www.siegelauctions.com/enc/p...hl_Vol_4.pdf

They are great resources but are quite old so not all of the Scott Catalogue numbers are listed individually and some have changed.

Siegel also has many other pdf articles available here:

http://www.siegelauctions.com/enc/pdf/

For a more up-to-date but less intense than Brookman, I recommend the two (so far) volumes by William Frangipane:

United States Stamps: A History v1 -Colonial Days to the Columbians
United States Stamps: A History v2 - The Bureau Era Begins

Very readable in spite of quite a few typos in the text, and excellent overviews and statistics.

I've also gotten a lot of mileage out of Sloan's Column edited by George Turner and Pat Paragraphs by Elliott Perry.

If you like the Pictorials, don't miss Jon Rose's United States Postage Stamps of 1869. It's a bargain IMHO for the $5.00 or so it fetches on Amazon. Just FYI - Abebooks.com is another excellent source for books of all kind. I always compare ebay, Amazon and Abe.

Molokai,
Hello and welcome to the forum! Thanks for the recommendations.

Most of the replies lean toward the collecting of stamps, but if I read your statement of preferences correctly, you are looking for information on postal history. That is a huge subject, but not well addressed in this forum, which as you can see is mostly stamp oriented. (Flak shield is up.)


The kinds of resources depend on the kind of postal history you are moving toward. For studies of fancy cancels the books by Skinner-Eno, Cole, ter Brakke, Weiss, and everything by the US Cancellation Club come to mind. For rates, the summaries by Beecher & Wawrukiewiscz give the basic info, but do not direct you in how to collect it.

If Postal History is becoming your thing, please continue to contribute here, but also visit the PhilaMercury website run by Richard Frajola. http://www.philamercury.com Warning: they are not gentle or particularly inviting to newbie collectors there, but you will not get more direct answers to specifics PH questions anywhere else.

Meanwhile, if you could tell us what field of postal history (rates, routes, markings, regional/local history) you wish to explore, perhaps we can recommend some things.

"I've also gotten a lot of mileage out of Sloan's Column edited by George Turner and Pat Paragraphs by Elliott Perry".

Anything Sloane or Perry wrote is worth reading; the "Christopher West" books on revenues and Match & Medicines were also written by Elliott Perry.

Speaking of philatelic literature ( I also collect books - on chess and trading) here is a list of dealers I found searching on the Internet. Does anyone know of others, please - or have comments on any of these?

http://acmrosh77.jimdo.com/da-phila...st-uploaded/
http://pbbooks.com/
http://www.ericjackson.com/rhome1c.asp
http://www.hhsales.co.uk/
http://www.jameslee.com/books.htm
http://www.michaelrogersinc.com/
http://www.philabooks.com
http://www.stamps4collectors.com/


(Of course there are the byways - digital repositories, libraries [esp APS's www.stamplibrary.org], the long-running Philatelic Literature Review, etc. etc.)

Apologies if this kind of information is redundant here; I am just getting back into the hobby after 40 years and lots of things are new to me!