In theory, international cancer organizations make sense as an advancement made in one place can be offered quickly to fellow cancer sufferers around the world. So the question is, how is this organization founded back in 1935 doing? So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. Despite the not great printing, I do like the image on this stamp. A Greek style hero in direct battle with a deadly beast. The Union for International Cancer Control is of course ..read more

Where would we be without the ultra helpful stamp advisors of local Sultans? Well stamp collectors aren’t  going to learn much about the province from official Omani issues and only a tiny portion of collectors are Mormon, and so are aware of Dhufar’s place in Mormon lore. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. This of course is not a real stamp so there is no catalog listing. It proports to remember the 100th anniversary of the Universal Posta ..read more

This stamp is a little bit reminiscent of a Japanese stamp done a while back, see https://the-philatelist.com/2019/02/13/japan-1942-saluting-the-japanese-pilot/   . Here we have an official portrait of DSO awarded pilot while he was still in the fight. There is a great story to tell. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. South African artist Neville Lewis had served in the British Army in World War I and between the wars developed a distinguis ..read more

By 1962, Bolivia was a poor, landlocked country. It’s last chance to date of real wealth came in the 1930s when oil was expected to be found in the Chaco region. Bolivia spent heavily to improve it’s military to be able to hold on to the claim to the area in the face of  the rival claims of Paraguay, a weak country with it’s own history of shrinking wars. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. So if a country never wins a war why celebrate the ..read more

From 1928-1973 the economy of the Soviet Union grew faster than the rival USA. After that there was a slowing down of progress. In 1986 new leader Gorbachev blamed the slowdown on Brezhnev and started a program to bring market forces into the industrial and agricultural economy. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. This stamp expressing the hope that the restructuring will succeed uses a great deal of traditional Soviet iconography. The whole poin ..read more

Around the time of this stamp, 40 % of the gold ever mined on earth had come from South African mines. Despite the artificially low prices of the metal due to being fixed to a basket of currencies, there was a class of Rand lords that had new fortunes. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. I love the image on this stamp. Having fought the earth to extract it, you now have the gold molten and pure and you can watch them being poured into the molds o ..read more

Johnny Appleseed’s real name is John Chapman. That happens to also be my name. So when I spotted this stamp, I knew it was time to learn more about him. Below is what I found. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. This stamp came out in an opportune time as the reputation of Johnny Appleseed was on the upswing in the sixties and seventies. The idea of an itinerant man planting trees and communing with the animals and the indians appealed directly t ..read more

The British Colonial architectural style has been long lasting, both for it’s tradition and for the accommodations made to it to account for the alien climates of other side of the world outposts. As the independent city state of Singapore has grown into one of the great world cities, it is not often possible to preserve what came before. So why not at least a stamp to remind that what came before was pretty good too. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Phila ..read more

Communism is a worldwide movement. For the first time in 1978, the regular Soviet backed world youth festivals was held outside eastern Europe and in  a poor brown country. Things got a little weird. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelists. This really is a great emblem for the convention that captures what happened very well. As the movement expands outward from where it started in Europe, it will naturally change to cope with the sensibilities ..read more

There is a lot going on on this stamp. I thought I would be writing about a newspaper man  but instead we get to go back in time to the Roman Empire. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist. This stamp celebrates the Jewish New Year. So three ancient Rabbis who worked on the post Jewish rejection of Christ Talmuds. The Talmuds explained Jewish law and Theology. Interestingly the stamps emphasize the Rabbis in addition to their Theological work al ..read more