August was an usually busy month. I suspect the hot summer weather kept many of us in with out stamps. We have been spoiled with a much milder summer than normal although we did have a lot of mid nineties in August. I have my second summer garden seedling ready to transplant this week. I’m betting the second planting will do as well as the first.

We have been working on the web site as much as we can and have listing sub categories of town cancels in the German offices and colonies section. Town cancels are very popular for many German area collectors. We have some especially office and colony nice cancels which we have added to our listings – take a look.

.We also updated several other sections of our web site listings in August including Saar, Memel and Upper Silesia. This month we will work revising and adding our Austria local listings. We have lots of truly rare items to list.

We anxiously wait to see of the Trump tariffs are going to be applied the European stamp purchases – it looks like some new taxes will be imposed. If so that will make overseas purchases very unattractive for US based collectors and dealers.

AUCTION NEWS

As active auction buyers, we watch all auctions in the US and overseas for good German and Austrian collections. The market for singles, sets and collections has been getting stronger and stronger in recent years with a major upturn occurring during the past three years.

The biggest price increases are for the truly scarce stamps and better collections.

The trend for the bigger auction houses is to hold their auctions live on the internet. This trend has increased bidding on lots and resulted in higher realizations overall. On line auctions improve the chances of bidders absent from the auction site to compete against floor bidders. Traditionally most of the better material has gone to floor bidders but this has changed. Auction houses also do a much better job of showing images of the stamps in collections on line. This improvement has done as much to increase online bidding. Buyers now have a realistic idea of the content and quality of each lot.

For collections the best auctions are Rasdales, Kelleher, and sometimes Dutch Country. They provide good descriptions and images.

The auctions that I consier best overall for Austrian and German material are

Daniel Kelleher Auctions, Danbury CT

Rasdale Stamps Auctions Chicago

H.R. Harmer New York

Cherrystone Stamp Auctions – New York

HBA (Hanseatische Briefmarkenauktionen OHG) Hamburg

Heinrich Kohler Auktion – Wiesbaden

Dutch Country Auctions, Wilmington DE

I should also mention that collectors interested in buying at auction should check out stampauctionnetwork.com. They list most of the major auctions conducted in the US and Europe. One can access each auction from this site which greatly simplifies the bidding process for buyers.

NEW ISSUES

We continue to supply a new issue service for the countries we stock. We make quarterly shipments for those who don’t like to wait. I would like to suggest though that it is more cost effective for customers to request new issues be shipped altogether at years end. Complete year sets generally run around two hundred dollars these days. Year groups qualify for higher discounts than quarterly shipments. We greatly appreciate those customers who sign up for year sets and provide us with authorization to charge their credit when the stamps are mailed. It greatly speeds the process for us.

AUSTRIA PHILATELIC SOCIETY (US)

We are in our 25th full year of the Austria stamp club. If you are a collector of Austrian stamps and covers we would like you to consider joining our group. We publish a quarterly bulletin in color and hold two club auctions a year. Our next auction will be included with the January bulletin. Our club auctions offer a wide variety of Austria related stamps and covers for very reasonable prices.

Dues are still only $16 a year for our US members and $23 a year for overseas members. You can join by sending us your check now. Dues for new members received from now through December will cover the 2025 membership year.

If you would like to see one of our club bulletins to help you decide , we will send you one.

R Schneider Stamps
PO Box 978
Iowa Park TX 76367

Office (618) 975 2099
Fax (940) 213 3596

Email:
Rschneiderstamps@gmail.com

Website:

RSchneiderstamps.com