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I watch You Tube a lot and quite often will look for interesting stamp related videos. It is not difficult to find a lot of them, but finding good ones is another matter. There are any number of them with titles that imply that the video maker is showing rare, and/or valuable stamps when the truth is that they are neither. The audio often reveals people who know next to nothing about the stamps they are showing, and some I have seen are made by what sounds, to me, to be kids around 10-13 years old who ascribe unrealistically high values to what turn out to be extremely common US definitives, which, really, are essentially worthless. Some much better ones are produced and presented by actual stamp dealers. Mark Bloxham, a dealer in the UK has a series of quite good ones on basic stamp knowledge, narrated by a very personable young lady who works for the company. Another series I have seen put out by Sandafayre, another UK dealer are also pretty good, but a bit commercial in that they usually feature collections they have (or, in most case, had) for sale. Still, they can be instructive in showing what the possibilities for a collection can be, and how to assemble them. By far the best series I've seen is called Exploring Stamps and is produced and presented by a young man who I believe is South African, named Graham Norton. I've seen several of them and they are uniformly excellent, great video, great production values, some even have music. The basic premise of most of the episodes is that Graham starts by pulling a single stamp out of a huge box, and begins to tell its story, weaving in history, geography, information about printing techniques, just about everything that can be gleaned from that one stamp. Most episodes are around 10-15 minutes long, a perfect length so you don't get bored. And he has a very pleasant South African accent, very easy to listen to. The best non-youtube video I've come across was one I found on the Stanley Gibbons website and is a lecture, about 45 minutes long, presented to the Royal Philatelic Society on the iconic 5 pound orange Queen Victoria stamp of Great Britain. It's presented by Dr John Horsey who wrote an entire book on that one stamp. The video is excellent, and highly recommended to anyone interested in 19th century GB stamps.
*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***
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Posted 04/25/2019 12:16 am
