May was essentially mid-summer weather here. We had many days of 100 degree highs and little rain. Nevertheless we had a lot of success with our garden again this year. Vegetables and flowers are doing really well.

We spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks resorting our German offices and colonies stock and have completely updated our web site listings of these issues. We have also added a couple hundred new items in other parts of our listings. We also have been working on our private post listings and will have this section of our web site updated this month. We have not published a printed price list for the past two months and have not received any complaints yet. Apparently it was time to change.

Just a reminder that Jill and I have divided our workload. I handle all order of stamps issued before the end of WWII and Jill handles all issues from the end of the war to now. The exceptions are that Jill handles all Liechtenstein and Luxembourg stamps also. The result of this division of labor is that your orders might arrive in two parts.

Deutschland -Spezial 2012

We received the new Volume I issued in late April. As has been usual for the past 6-7 years there are no significant changes in the catalog listings. Michel has not done a major revision of any section of the catalog in that time. The catalog is essentially are print of last year’s catalog with every page exactly matching last years catalog – including the absence of price changes. I noticed only two small price changes in the many pages I compared.

Vol II has a small advantage over volume I as they add the new issues to their listings in Vol II so there is some new information.

If your catalog is less than ten years old – a new one is a waste of money!

I bought my catalogs from
https://www.briefmarken.de/michelshop in Germany. The postpaid price for each volume was 112 Euro. The ordering process was easy and their service was excellent.

Our Treasure Boxes

We have been offering these boxes fo r about 11 years – almost every customer who has tried one box has ordered another. We have quite a supply of treasure box material – excess stock, areas we don’t normally stock, and just plain stamps we don’t have time to examine. We always insure that there are stamps of value included in the boxes but otherwise don’t check anything. There of course will be a lot German and Austrian related stamps and covers in the lots but there can be almost anything philatelic. These lots are designed for collectors who like to search through lots of philatelic items. Each $175 lot is different from the others and each will fill a medium priority box.

We have been selling a lot of our treasure boxes because the large volume of stamps and covers gives collectors a lot of pleasure searching through the pile. We still have some boxes ready to mail!

Our Online Specials

We offer specials on our web site regularly. For some reason we sell fewer of these than we expected to sell. It seems that our web site customers just don’t notice the special listings. We think this is happening because we frequently get orders for items in the regular listings which are also offered in the specials section at a lower price.

We also list items in the special sections which don’t quite fit into our regular categories – e.g. mini-collections and unusual varieties.

SOME SPECIALS (NORMAL DISCOUNTS APPLY)