Stamps

Spink, the specialist London coin and stamp auctioneers, have announced auction revenues of £23.8m including premium for 2007.

LONDON coins, medals and stamps specialists Spink have bought the American stamp auctioneers Shreves Philatelic Galleries.

NOBLE Investments, the publicly listed coins company and owners of Baldwin’s auctioneers, have branched out into the stamps market.

ON Friday and Saturday, February 23 and 24, the Royal Bath and West Showground at Shepton Mallet will host the largest postcard, tradecard, postal history and ephemera fair in the UK.

THE world stamp market is reeling this week after what could prove to be a €5bn pyramid selling scheme was unmasked in Spain.

FINE ART buyers may recoil from bloodied dead game or memento mori skulls on still lifes, but the rest of the market knows no such delicacy. Death and disaster, after a suitable lapse of time, become marketing opportunities, as was demonstrated at the Chiswick rooms of Harmers (15% buyer’s premium) on October 22 when their wide reputation as philately auctioneers brought them the remarkable Günther Heyd Disaster Mail collection from Germany.

Frontline forgery: LETTERS home during WW2 were extremely important to soldiers on the front. Each soldier was issued a quota of stamps which were specially overprinted to validate their posting from a specific location.

UK: BOOKS were not really the main attraction in this sale, although it did contain a 1795 first edition of John Aikin’s illustrated Description of the Country... round Manchester. This was, however, an ex-library copy that had been rebound and had its share of stamps.