The featured article from the April issue of the American Philatelist, “The U.S. Civil War in Contemporary Illustrated Material,” by Eliot A. Landau, mentions an exhibit available from the APRL. The complete exhibit is not yet available, but we have acquired scans of the items from the exhibit and you can view them on the APS website in the AP bonus content area.

The article mentions covers and songsheets produced by Charles Magnus. The Winterthur Library has a collection of Magnus material, including covers and lettersheets. A finding aid for the collection is available on their website.

I will be in Portland, Oregon next week for PIPEX and the WE Festival.

I’ll be staffing an APS booth at the show, so if you are going, stop by and say hello! I’ll have copies of the latest issue of the Philatelic Literature Review, plans for the new library, digital books for sale, and all the usual APS goodies.

As part of the WE Festival, I’ll give a presentation on “How to Research” at 1pm on Friday. It’s open to the public.

Board of the Northern Philatelic Library. From left to right, standing: Steve Lund, Director; Al Sarvi, Managing Director; Brian Wilson, Director; Paul Hempel, Vice President Seated: David Bushard, Librarian; Gene Young, President; Dick Westerling, Director

On May 1 the world’s newest philatelic library became operational in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Northern Philatelic Library was created primarily to serve philatelists in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Volunteers have been hard at work in recent months preparing its new home at 1116 Sims Avenue. Although it is being established as a separate legal entity, it has a close partnership with the Northern Philatelic Society with which it has a joint board (see above). Members of the Northern Philatelic Society are automatically members of the Library and are eligible to borrow materials. David Buchard is the Librarian. The library expects to have an online catalog of its holding operational shortly. A grand opening for the library is scheduled for July in conjunction with the Minnesota Stamp Expo. Congratulations to all of those involved in making  the Northern Philatelic Library a reality.

I’m in the process of revising my exhibit on America’s public libraries and their forerunners for the Rocky Mountain Stamp Show in Denver later this month. I have a cover in the exhibit with two labels on the back depicting the Carnegie Library in Columbus, OH.  It was the Carnegie Library aspect of the labels that led to my purchase of the cover, but the labels also have a significant connection to the history of the American Philatelic Society (APS) and its predecessor the American Philatelic Association (APA). The labels indicate that the library is the “Home of the Columbus Collector’s Club”.  They also indicate that the American Philatelic Association will hold its 1908 National Convention at the library. The cover was mailed on July 7, 1907 from Cincinnati to Alliance, OH. Seeing the cover again prompted me to try to find out more about the 1908 APA Convention. Fortunately, I didn’t have far to look. In 1986 Robert L.D. Davidson wrote a whole series of articles in the American Philatelist titled “APS: The First Century”. The April 1986 article was titled “From Association To Society”. It turns out that it was at the 1908 convention that the APA changed its name to the American Philatelic Society. The vote to change the name (including proxies) was 527 to 171. Over the years I have come across a number of covers that connect libraries to philately, and this one is especially nice.

APRL acquisitions, March 16, 2012-April 15, 2012. To request loans, copies, or scans, or to search our catalog, visit the APRL website.

APRL News([Bellefonte, Pa.]: American Philatelic Society, [2012]-): 28 cm.

Bauer, William H. Colorado 1858-1876: pre-territorial and territorial periods [exhibit] [electronic resource] ([n.l.]: [n.p.], [2006?]): 1 computer optical disk: col. ill.; 4 3/4 in. [CD-ROM Bauer, William H.]

Bianchi, Paolo. Colonia Eritrea: vent’anni di storia postale (1883-1903) /(Lugano: Edizioni Arte e Moneta, 1989.): 210 p.: ill. (part col.), facsims., maps; 24 cm. [G8333 .E7 B577cv 1989]

Cabeen, Richard McP. Military commemorative stamps 1931-1933 ([Chicago]: [Chicago Tribune], [1933?]): [5] leaves; 28 x 22 cm. folded to 22 x 14 cm.

Cachets: newsletter of BNAPS First Day Cover Study Group (Aurora, ON, Canada: BNAPS First Day Cover Study Group, 1998-): ill.; 28 cm.

» Continue reading “New books at the APRL, April 2012″

I’ve been collecting postal artifacts related to libraries for more than 17 years, and I’ve been exhibiting these artifacts at stamp shows since 2003. In 2005 I realized that I had accumulated enough items with a connection to the American Philatelic Research Library to put together a one frame exhibit of the items. I showed the exhibit for the first time on a non-competitive basis at StampShow 2005 in Grand Rapids, MI. More recently I’ve been including my APRL postal items in a three frame non-competitive exhibit titled “America’s Philatelic Libraries & Museums”. At the WISCOPEX stamp show on April15 in Madison, WI I went back to a one frame exhibit which is titled simply “The American Philatelic Research Library”. Part of my purpose in showing the exhibit was to help promote the current efforts to raise funding to relocate the APRL in an expanded space in the American Philatelic Center. I will also be showing the exhibit at the Rocky Mountain Stamp Show in Denver in May. I hope to make the exhibit available to other stamp shows that allow non-competitive exhibits in the future.

I write the “Philatelic Library News” column for the Philatelic Literature Review, and one of the major sources of information for that column is the online newsletters of the philatelic libraries. Three of the newsletters are especially noteworthy. They are: Scribblings, the bi-monthly newsletter of the Rocky Mountain Philatelic Library in Denver, Colorado; Book Reports, the bi-monthly newsletter of the Northwest Philatelic Library in Portland, Oregon; and Stamp Tracks, the quarterly newsletter of the Postal History Foundation and the Slusser Memorial Library in Tucson, Arizona. Access to current and archived issues of the newsletters are available freely to anyone over the Internet. These newsletters are quite good and contain substantive articles about a variety of philatelic topics in addition to news about the libraries.

Did you know that the APRL has a collection of exhibit copies?

We have almost 700 exhibit reproductions in the library. Of these, 50 are digital scans, and the remainder are paper copies.As we receive permission, we are posting exhibits that we have in digital format on our website for members to view.

Paper exhibit copies can be checked out of the library just like books. Many are reproduced in full color, while others are black and white.

To search our exhibit holdings, go to the online catalog and enter “exhibit” in the Record Type box. You can then add title, subject, or author (exhibitor) keywords to your search. When we have information about awards the exhibit has won, we add that information to the catalog record.

Interested in donating a copy of your exhibit to the library?

It’s easy! You can either mail us a paper copy of your exhibit, or send us an electronic copy. You can even send both paper and digital versions, which allows the library and our researchers the most flexibility.

Most scanned exhibits are too large to send as email attachments, so we recommend burning the files to CD-ROM and mailing the disk to us, or using a file sharing service (such as Dropbox, which is free and comes with step-by-step instructions).

If you are willing to have your exhibit posted on the web, print and sign our license form and send it to us along with your exhibit.

Why donate a copy of your exhibit?

Donating your exhibit helps new exhibitors improve their exhibits and allows researchers to learn from your work. It also preserves your work for future generations of philatelists.

Need to update a donated exhibit?

No problem. Simply send us a revised copy and we’ll add it to the collection.

Left to right: Rudy Keller, Bruce Marsden, Ernie Bergman

Last week, three officers of the American Helvetia Philatelic Society met at the American Philatelic Center. Rudy Keller, Bruce Marsden, and Ernie Bergman told me they thought it was the first time that three members of the AHPS had been at the center together. I took a picture of the three of them perusing Swiss books in the library.

They were especially pleased to see The Industrielle Kriegs-wirtschaft issue of Switzerland 1918-1919 displayed on our new arrivals shelf.

After spending one afternoon doing research and visiting the sales department, Rudy spent two days in the library volunteering. He sorted through our vast holdings of Michel catalogs to make sure that we had two copies in good condition of each catalog, and removed any extra copies so that they can be sold.

Of course, as a Swiss collector, Rudy told me he much prefers the Zumstein catalogs, and generously donated a copy of the most recent Zumstein catalog to the library during his visit.

After bringing order to the mountain of catalogs, Rudy then put his extensive language skills to work helping us to determine whether books that had come in as part of a donated library would be of value to philatelic researchers. (We sometimes get non-philatelic books as part of donations, and these are best given to other libraries or sold, because we don’t have room to store material outside of the scope of our collection.)

It’s always exciting to have visitors in the library. We’re especially grateful to Rudy for the gift of his time and talent.

Last week, the APS Stamp Talk radio show with Nancy Clark featured digitization. During the first half of the show, Nancy talked with Todd Ronnei of the American First Day Cover Society about the recent digitization of the entire run of the society’s journal, First Days.

During the second half of the show, I was the guest and Nancy and I talked about digitization in the APRL and the Philatelic Union Catalog.

The show has been archived and you can listen on the WSRadio website.