Hinged vs Never Hinged...frankly my dear I don't give a.....

A couple months ago in a previous post I talked about the debate over whether it is better to collect mint stamps in hinged or never hinged condition, and the legacy that the never hinged fetish has created for the current generation of collectors.

As I said then, for me I tend to have a cutoff date of around 1960 for stamps in hinged or never hinged condition, which coincides with the first major hingeless stamp mount to gain wide popularity among American collectors, the (now infamous) Crystal Mounts from Harris. Pre-1960, I won't turn my nose up if offered a never hinged set if it is at a good price, but for me hinged is just as acceptable, provided there is no damage on the stamp from the legacy of being hinged at one point in its life.  Since I collect using Lighthouse Vario pages, the stamps will not of course be re-hinged, so that while they are in my personal custody no potential further harm from hinges will result.

(This last point is relevant today because hinges produced in the past twenty years or so are no where near as good as the ones produced back in the late pre-war and early post-war era. Just ask any collector who has been collecting for several decades and they will get a wistful look in their eyes remembering how good the quality of hinges were "back in the day")

Anyways today in the mail I received an item I had ordered from well known Australian stamp dealer (and owner/operator of the Stampboards.com forum) Glen Stephens.  I remember this set well as a kid, it was one of the first sets I ever helped my father mount onto album pages (with Crystal Mounts *shudder*) when I was a budding philatelist growing up in the St Lawrence Valley of New York State.

The iconic first Queen Elizabeth II definitive issue from Singapore, 1955. A piece of my childhood memories of collecting with my late father now brought back into my life, at a price that did not break my collecting budget. 

Mr. Stephens had offered this set on the Stampboards.com forum sales subforum (which is a great place to get stamps, and offer stamps for sale - definitely worth checking out!).  Yes it was listed as hinged, but it looked beautiful and the price being asked, AU$60.00 or about US$50 at the time, was I thought a bargain for one of the iconic definitive issues of the 1950s British Commonwealth. I was away on vacation when he listed it, and feared that it would get snatched up by some wise collector before I returned home. But the fates were kind to me, and I claimed it within about an hour of returning to Columbus.

The scan probably does not do the stamps justice. They are gorgeous. The $5 coat of arms, in particular, is beautifully centered and very fresh, with just the lightest hint that at some point in its life it was hinged by a previous collector. A couple values have some light toning, but we are talking about stamps issued in a colony with a tropical climate. A little tan is not a bad thing in my opinion, though other collectors would probably vehemently disagree.

Of course many would argue that since it is a hinged set, it has lost a lot of its value.  Both Gibbons and Scott value the set in Never Hinged condition only (Scott CV in 2012 for NH was US$150, Gibbons has it at £130 (approx US$200) in the 4th edition (2013) of the Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore catalog.) This is probably why no one jumped on the set immediately when it was listed. It had the "scarlet letter" of hinge marks. My gain, the set is a beauty, and in the end how many people collect stamps to show them gum-side out to show that  they are in "virginal never hinged condition?"

I will never understand why the main catalog publishers do not provide guideline for hinged material in the period from the start of their "never hinged" pricing until around 1960.  Yes most collectors these days will pay premiums for never hinged material, but there are a lot of gorgeous sets whose only "sin" is that they were hinged, but otherwise may be superior in centering or other measures of stamp condition. Even just a rough percent discount that would be appropriate for hinged material would be more helpful that complete silence, since there is a LOT of this material in the marketplace. 

Personally, until such time as the catalog publishers finally realize that some guidance for hinged pricing for the early never-hinged price years is something that many collectors will find useful, I'll continue searching for these wonderful sets in hinged condition and snatch them up for a song.  Because in the end I think dealers and collectors are heavily undervaluing them all for the name of some sense of "purity" of gum on the small supply of these issues that, at the time of their issuing, were not hinged by collectors as was the usual practice for mounting stamps in an album at that time. 

The "democratization" of philatelic retail - the impact of the internet on the philatelic marketplace....

Over at the Stamp Community Forum there has been a lively debate going on regarding the impact of ebay and other online marketplaces upon the business side of the hobby.  The discussion started with the question "Can dealers compete with ebay?" and has ranges across several related topics, as is the want of a forum thread that is already eight pages long.

My reply to the question was that the question was asking the wrong thing. It's not a question of dealers competing with ebay, but rather "Should dealers consider using ebay as a platform for their business"  Ebay itself is simply a tool, a digital marketplace where buyers and sellers can meet in cyberspace and exchange goods.

Which raises a separate question. Is there a difference in the terms dealer and seller?

A question of semantics to be sure. I would say anyone who is offering to sell stamps, in any marketplace, is a dealer.  Others would seem to prefer to "rarify" the term dealer by restricting it only to those who make a professional living from their business. For those who only do a little business on the side, they would argue that -seller- is a better term.  And in the end, the "sellers" on ebay are making it much more difficult for many "dealers" to make a living.

This observation then leads to the actual heart of the issue at question - the decline in value of most stamps over the past decade.  And here it would be wise to not separate the two groups into "dealers" and "sellers" because they are all doing the same thing : offering stamps for sale to buyers.

If we think about how the business of philately operated say back in the 1980s (yes I am sure that is ancient history for some readers of this blog, who may not have even been alive then.  Me I was a teenager, working on my stamp collection while listening to Bon Jovi, Miami Sound Machine and Heart on the radio). You had your local stamp dealers if you lived in a large enough metropolitan area. You had dealers who advertised in publications such as Linn's Stamp News.  But unless you travelled a great deal around the country, it was often difficult to find stamp dealers who might have the material you are looking for.  You could write to those dealers who placed ads in the various philatelic publications, but in general the total number of people selling stamps in the 1980s was fairly small, and in general the demand for stamps equaled the supply available (or seemingly only available) through dealers.  In that retail environment, most stamps tended to rise in price slowly, and some that would become -hot- issues could rise very fast very quickly, as anyone who remembers the US stamp bubble of the late 1970s can attest.  Philatelic retail was, I would argue, controlled by an "oligarchy" of dealers, many of whom were quite chummy with each other and would rarely move to undersell their product verses a competing dealer.

Then came the internet, and all the rules of philatelic retail were changed. Philatelic retail became "democratized" and the benefit has been to the buyer at the expense of the dealer.

Today, the ability of the buyer to "comparison shop" between different dealers of stamps is so much, much greater than it was in the 1980s.  And, with the ease the internet provides to allow anyone to become a purveyor of stamps (compared to the days when most dealers had huge overhead in the cost of a shop, the cost of advertising, etc) it means the potential for a large number of retailers to join the marketplace now existed  The result is that today there is now a lot greater supply of stamps in the marketplace for purchase than there was in the 1980s.  What might have been 20 dealers in the USA offering stamp X for sale via local channels and, perhaps, an advertisement in a national publication, now has become 200 dealers of offering the same stamp, and the buyer can compare prices with just a few keyboard clicks.

The one problem with this of course is that demand for many stamps has not kept pace with the increase in availability of supply in the marketplace.  This is especially true for the "meat and potatoes" type of stamps - those stamps that were always worth more than being packet material back in the 1980s, but they were not so rare as to be nearly unobtainable unless you had deep pockets.  It turns out that these "meat and potato" stamps exist in sufficient quantity that if you have more sellers offering to sell the item than buyers to buy them, the value of the stamp is going to decrease in the marketplace.  This is especially the case for the stamps of Western Europe and North America where demand is weak due to the lack of new collectors of the stamps of the West and the vast quantities of most stamps printed at time of issue. Many stamps are now selling at a percent below face value in the marketplace because they are so common and demand is so weak for them. Countries that were -hot- in the 1980s like Germany have in particular been hit hard. A perusal of the Scott Catalogs and comparing prices clearly illustrates this - most of the "meat and potato" stamps have either remained stagnant or declined in catalog value over the past decade.

Meanwhile those stamps that always have been rare due to limited quantity in desired conditions continue to this day to increase in value because there will never be enough supply to meet demand. High quality pre-1930 USA issues, for example, continue to rise in value if they are in above average condition.  And of course one can not forget the impact of booms and bubbles in in philately. While the Chinese stamp market did decline a bit over the past couple years due to China's own internal economic weakness, the days when Chinese stamps of the pre-1990 era sold just above face value are never going to come back either, as it seems the supply of these issues is much less than the demand even when you factor out speculation.

Dealers who do not make use of sites such as ebay, Delcampe, Zillions of Stamps and others here I think really are making a grave business error. These platforms provide an audience of millions of potential collectors from around the world that the dealer would never have been able to reach had the structure of the retail trade remained the same as it was in the 1980s.  The cold hard reality is that the marketplace is now much, much bigger than it was, and as the amount of supply has grown faster than the demand for stamps from collectors, the laws of supply and demand work to the benefit of the buyer. And this will remain the case until a new equilibrium between supply and demand is reached.  It is a whole new retail ballgame in philately, and the days of the stationary retail brick-and-mortar stamp shop are probably numbered. A dealer with the cost of overhead such as owning a retail space is going to find it difficult to compete with a dealer selling items from the comfort of his or her home.

It's A Charlie Brown Christmas at the USPS this year

Back in the late summer the USPS announced the subject of this year's contemporary Christmas issue. Fifty years ago this coming December the animated cartoon "A Charlie Brown Christmas," based on the characters of the legedary American cartoonist Charles Schulz, was broadcast on the CBS network.

For a whole generation of Gen-Xers like myself, the annual broadcast of this animated film was proof that the holiday season was truly here and soon Santa Claus would be making his rounds.  The film itself was written by Schulz as a reminder of what the point of celebrating Christmas was originally all about, in an age where mass commercialism was rapidly changing its meaning in the collective American psyche.

The 2015 Charlie Brown Christmas double-sided booklet pane of 20, released 1 Oct 2015 by the USPS. 

The new stamps are available only in double-sided panes of 20 self-adhesive stamps, and capture many of the classic vignettes from the 1965 film.  For a sentimental Gen-Xer like myself, these designs truly bring back many great memories of holiday seasons past. 

My only qualm with the issue is the layout - twelve stamps on one side, eight on the other.  With ten different designs and the double-sided format, this means that you really need to collect the entire pane of 20 to be able to have a complete set that maintains the se-tenant format for the entire issue, which is only possible for the arrangement of the stamps on the twelve stamp side.  

As a way to minimize use of extra paper backing and save space for the consumer the layout is great, for the collector not so much.  But at US$9.80 for the pane, it's not a bank breaker. And we can be thankful that there was only one printer used, in one format.  I would not be fond of going back to the days in the late-1990s when a plethora of printers were used on contemporary holiday issues, resulting in three or more different varieties of the same set. A specialists dream in terms of perforation varieties and printing varieties, but definitely much more expensive on the collector's bank account.

In the end though it is funny to reflect on the background of this issue and its release this year.  Schulz created the film as a way to challenge what he saw as the growing commercialization of the holiday in a rapidly secularizing American society of the 1960s. Yet today, the Peanuts "brand" has become as much about making profits for the company holding the copyright to the characters as it is about entertaining and educating Americans. In a few weeks the first full-length animated film based around the Peanuts characters will be released in cinemas worldwide (and from the various previews that have been produced over the past year, it looks to be an amazing production showcasing just how far animation has come in the decades since the release of the Christmas special in 1965).

Schulz himself passed away in 2000. One wonders what he would have made of what has become of his creations in the intervening fifteen years since his passing. He himself consented to licensing use of the characters for advertising purposes (the classic Met Life insurance ads have used Snoopy in its ads since 1987) so I think it would be safe to say that he would not be totally aghast, and clearly the characters he created remain much beloved in American, and indeed global, pop culture.

The Future of Scott Catalogs - Take The Survey!!

A couple days ago Amos Publishing sent out a survey form via various dealers to survey the philatelic community about how they would like to see the Scott Catalogs organized in the future. The current six-volume general catalog has apparently reached its size limit, and Scott is going to have to choose either to expand the existing format into more volumes or perhaps re-arrange the organization of the catalogs along geographic and historic lines (much as Stanley Gibbons, Michel and Yvert et Tellier already do for their catalogs).

Thankfully the publishers in their email included a link to their survey and permission to share the link, and a kind soul at the Stampboards Forum posted it.  Since this is something that I think every collector who uses Scott catalogs even on a casual basis should be participating in, I have decided to put the link to the survey here below.

Scott Catalogue Collector Survey

It's not a long survey, and at the end you have a chance to register to win a copy of the Scott Classic Specialized Stamp Catalog 1840-1940.

The one thing that the survey does NOT address is the question of digital versions of the Scott Catalogs.  This is a shame, since digital reference really is the future for hobbies such as philately.  Collectors my age (I am 44) and younger are very much wired into the digital world, and really live our lives connected to the internet.

While the survey does not directly address digital versions, it does offer respondants a space to leave further comments and opinions. My suggestion to those who believe Amos Publishing need to bring the Scott Catalogs fully into the twenty-first century is to fill this section out with what you think the optimal digital version of a Scott Catalog would be.

On my part, I suggested the following ideas

1. regional organization similar to SG, Michel and Yvert Catalogs
2. fully functional search feature within catalogs based on keyword
3. clear digital images of all stamps listed, not just one -sample- design as currently in the Scott Catalogs
4. ability to use the product offline for those occasions when one is at a show or bourse and there is either poor Wi-Fi access or none at all.
5. My last suggestion would probably be controversial : allow those who buy the digital version of the catalogs be able to have a low-price point subscription model that would allow automatic updates of content (such as adding new issues once they are given Scott numbers) and the ability to purchase new editions of the full catalog at a reduced price.  This is roughly similar to the model my favorite gaming company, Paradox Interactive in Sweden, follows for its historical strategy game - you buy the game, get free patches to fix errors, access to some free new peripheral content, and then ability to purchase new updated versions with more changed and new content at a price lower than the original game.  This is a model that works well for gaming, and I think would work well here for Amos Publishing to make the Scott Catalogs the best catalog for stamp collectors going forward into the twenty-first century.

In any case, take a few minutes to fill out the Scott survey and let your voice be heard!!

A what if of philately...the US overseas possessions....

The most recent post to JKJblue's excellent blog deals with the stamps of post-partition Samoa.  This of course means the stamps issued for the western half of the Samoa archipelago, as from the time of its annexation by the United States in 1900, the eastern half of the archipelago used (and still uses) the postage stamps of the United States.

This is not an exception for American overseas terrtories.  With the exception of the Philippines, which did issue its own postage stamps during the United States administration of 1899-1946 (likely because the Philippines had its own currency at the time of annexation, the Philippine Peso, and that currency was retained by the US Administration), and the overprints issued in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American war of 1898 for Guam and Puerto Rico, American overseas terrritories have used the postage stamps of the United States from the time they came under American rule.

One of the most beautiful stamps issued during the US Administration of the Philippines, the 1932 2c Mount Mayon pictorial (image courtesy mountainstamp.com)

USA 1c Benjamin Franklin stamp of 1894 overprinted -GUAM- for use on that island after its capture by US forces during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Regular USA issues would be used on the island after 1901.  (image courtesy pecollectibles.com)

Similarly, after the US annexation of Hawaii in 1898 separate postal issues would be superceded by regular United States issues in 1901.

1899 stamp issued by the US administration in Hawaii, the high value in a set of three stamps that would be the last separate issue for Hawaii before its stamps were replaced by regular US stamps. (image courtesy treasurecoastamps.com)

The same fate would befall the Western Virgin Islands after they passed from Danish to American rule in 1917 when the US government bought the islands from Denmark.

Danish West Indies stamp depicting King Christian X, one of a set of eight issued in 1915 that would be the last stamps released before the transfer to American sovereignty in 1917 and the end of the Western Virgin Islands separate philatelic identity (image courtesy linns.com)

I always thought it was a pity that the overseas external territories *cough colonies* of the United States lost their philatelic identity so quickly after they came under American administration. As the Mount Mayon stamp from the Philippines shows, the potential for some truly beautiful stamps that depicted these, to Americans in the contiguous 48 states, exotic lands governed by the United States would have been great.

The Postal Service would, to a degree, do this with the Overseas Territories issues of 1937, although Guam and American Samoa were not given any recognition in this series.

The 1937 External Territories issue of the US Postal Service, honoring Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, but NOT Guam or American Samoa. (image courtesy delcampe.net)

A lovely set, isn't it?  Now imagine what *could* have been had the external territories been given postal autonomy to issue their own stamps under US Postal Service oversight.

But...it never came to pass. Alaska and Hawaii acceded to Statehood in 1959.  While Puerto Rico became a Commonwealth/Estado Libre Asociado in 1952, it did not regain postal autonomy, and given recent events on the island, the likelihood it will become a full-fledged state in the next decade seem quite high. And the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam remain external territories, with varying degrees of self-government, and (non-voting) representation in the US House of Representatives. And they continue to use regular United States postage stamps.

On a similar note, I think it is also sad that the five French overseas departments (départements d'outre-mer) also have lost philatelic autonomy. No more separate issues for Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Reunion or, more recently, Mayotte. The distinctive cultures of these five territories produced some gorgeous stamps during their philatelic lifetimes, and while the French have issued stamps depicting scenes or personalities from these regions from time to time over the past sixty years, something I think was definitely lost to philately with the end of their philatelic independence.

Iconic low value stamp from the 1947 pictorial issue of Guadeloupe.  Alas this would be the final set of stamps issued specifically for the island, as stamps of France itself would replace Guadeloupe stamps shortly thereafter. (from author's collection)

Stamp issued by France in 1970 depicting the Rocher du Diamant in the overseas department of Martinique.  Martinique, like Guadeloupe, issued its last stamps in 1947. A beautiful stamp to be sure, but only one of a handful of stamps released in the past nearly seventy years depicting the overseas departments (image courtesy delcampe.net).

Of course, philatelic independence can also go horribly wrong, as the recent philatelic histories of the external realms of the Kingdom of the Netherlands - Curacao, Aruba, Saint Maarten, and the Caribbean Netherlands communes of Saba, Saint Eustatius and Bonaire, will attest. Philatelic independence for these external territories had in the past five years led to their selling their philatelic souls to a philatelic agency that issues stamps in their name with often only little relevance to the local cultures. But this is a recent phenomenon, and in particular I always found the stamps of Aruba in particular to be gorgeous until it made its bargain with the philatelic devil. 

Aruba 1993 Folklore issue, from the days when Aruba's philatelic production was conservative, relevant to the island, and the stamp designs in general of a very high quality. (image courtesy delcampe.net)

Aruba 2014 Classic Cars issue, released by the philatelic agency the Aruba Post Office sold its soul to.  Higher-than necessary face values, little cultural resonance to the island, and less that stellar artwork.(image courtesy delcampe.net)

So perhaps this is one of those double-edged sword issues, since the temptation by almost all postal services these days semes to be to to use their philatelic programs as cash-cows, cashing in on the popular topics and generally ignoring the culture, history and society of the countries or territories the stamps purport to represent.

Are Philatelic "Rogue States" helpful or harmful to stamp collecting????

Over at his excellen Big Blue 1840-940 blog as part of his post on the classic era stamps of St Vincent, jkjblue discusses some interesting data he crunched comparing stamp output to population for modern issues (he based his study on the issues of 1980 to 2012). His results were quite interesting based on the number of stamps released per 1 million people in population

"The Top 51
(Total Stamp issues 1980-2012 normalized for one million population )

1. Grenada Grenadines – 4410/.008* = 551,250
2. Grenadines of St Vincent – 3153/.009* = 350,333
3. Nevis – 2753/.009 = 305,888
4. Palau – 3256/.019 = 171,368
5. Antigua & Barbuda – 4423/.064 = 69,109
6. Grenada – 5528/.1 = 55,280
7. St Vincent – 6586/.121 = 54,429
8. Dominica – 3467/.065 = 53,338
9. Marshall Islands – 3056/.066 = 46,303
10. St Thomas & Prince – 4363/.155 = 28,148 
11. Micronesia – 2408/.13 = 18,523.
12. Maldives – 4011/.3 = 13,370
13. Guyana – 7606/.7 = 10,865
14. Gambia – 6293/1.1 = 5,720
15. Guinea-Bissau – 5855/1.2 = 4,879
16. Comoros – 2535/.6 = 4,225
17. Liberia – 4990/2.6 = 1,919
18. Guinea – 8750/7.5 = 1,166
19. Mongolia – 2591/2.6 = 996.5
20. Sierra Leone – 5204/5.3 = 982
21. Central Afr. Rep. – 3205/3.4 =942.6
22. Togo – 3202/4.3 =744.6
23. New Zealand – 2178/3.7 = 588.6
24. Nicaragua – 2430/4.4 = 552.3
25. Libya – 2259/5.0 = 451.8
26. Mozambique – 5569/16.5 = 337
27. Cuba – 3189/11.1 = 287.3
28. Portugal – 2330/9.9 = 235.4
29. Belgium – 2283/10.4 = 219.5
30. Hungary – 2197/10.2 = 215.4
31. Ghana -3372/18.1 = 186.3
32. North Korea – 4128/22.2 = 186
33. Cambodia – 2110/11.6 = 181.9
34. Australia – 3188/17.9 = 178.1
35. Tanzania – 4806/31.3 = 154
36. Romania – 2992/22.6 = 132.4
37. Uganda – 2742/21.6 = 126.9
38. Taiwan – 2442/22.1 = 110.5
39. Venezuela – 2175/23.3 = 93.3
40. Spain – 2297/39.2 = 58.6
41. France – 3080/59.0 = 52.2
42. Bulgaria – 2213/42.9 = 51.6
43. Philippines – 3481/68.6 = 50.7
44. Great Britain – 2741/59.1 = 46.4
45. Japan – 4870/126.2 = 38.6
46. Thailand 2305/60.6 = 38.1
47. Vietnam – 2567/77.3 = 33.2
48. USSR/Russia – 3030/147.1* = 20.6
49. Brazil – 2296/157.1 = 14.6
50. United States – 3518/281.4 = 12.5
51. China – 2915/1,246.9 = 2.4"

Source : Big Blue 1840-1940 Blog

The top 20 nations are of course nations that have huge stamp outputs and small populations, and are dominated by nations represented by a few (in-)famous philatelic agents who release issues in the names of these nations depicting all sorts of topical themes, from Cats and Dogs to Pop Stars and everything (and anything) in between.

To a large percent of the stamp collecting community, these -stamps- are little more than glorified wallpaper being peddled under often questionable circumstances with little relevance to the nations they purport to represent, all in the quest to part (mainly topical) collectors from their coin.

Exploitative stamp issues released with an eye to cashing in on collector interest is of course nothing new. The United States Columbian Exposition Commemorative of 1893, an issue of 16 stamps in a range of values from US$0.01 to US$5,00 (which in 2015 dollar purchasing power, would be well over US$130 today!), resulted in howls of protest from the philatelic media of the day, and the issue would not really begin to sell over face value for the high values until the 1930s when a whole new cadre of collectors entered the hobby in wake of both the Great Depression and the high profile philatelic activities of both a British King (George V) and an American President (Franklin Roosevelt).

In the 1970s the American Philatelic Society, which at one time included global new issue listing in its journal The American Philatelist, created the "Black Blot Program" program to list new issues its editors felt were exploitative to the collector community, often issues of a topical nature from developing nations in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Basin and the Caribbean.  In the end the APS would end listing global new issues altogether, and the Black Blot program was soon just a memory.  Interestingly enough, many of those 1970s issues that received Black Blots have gone on to appreciate in value somewhat more (and sometime very much more) than their face value at release than stamps whose release were not seen as a threat to the philatelic wallet.

Since then the tide of new issues has truly become an antidiluvian flood of issues, and not just from countries who have "sold their philatelic souls to agents." Japan now regularly tops 300 stamps per year, while nations as respectable as New Zealand, the United States, Australia and Great Britain routinely have more than 100, and total cost due to much higher face values means keeping up with new issues can be a challenge financially for many collectors. A large percent of the collector community shun modern-day issues as a result.

At the same time though, if there was not a demand for the -wallpaper- issues of Saint Vincent, Central African Republic and the like, why do nations continue to allow these agents to issue stamps in their name.  There must be some benefit to at least someone in the issuing nation (even if not to the budget of the issuing nation or the general population as a whole) and the market must be large enough to keep demand for these issues growing. There must be a large enough cadre of "casual collectors" purchasing this material because the images on the releases appeal to the them enough to pay hard cash for the stamps. What perecent of this group moves beyond the occasional purchase of the latest Formula 1 stamps from Mozambique or Obama stamps from Saint Vincent is hard to qualify,

In the end collectors collect what they like, and they determine what they want to collect.  As I have been working on French colonial issues the last couple years, I have also begun collecting stamps from the independent successor states.  While one can often quibble that there was no reason for, say, Cameroun to honor Space Achievements as it did on a series of issues in the late-1960s, I would argue that at least in comparison to much of the production today (both by countries represented by agencies and nations that still control their new issue programs) the quality of design was much higher (many of these issues were produced in France by the French post office printers by multi-color engraving, and are really stunning pieces of artwork). And in comparison to face value at time of release, some of these "international" topical issues (though not all, to be fair) have appreciated quite nicely in the intervening decades.

Cameroun's 1968 Satellite Communication issue. Directly relevant to Cameroun, not really, but design-wise quite beautiful and a nice example of the growing "internationalization" of culture in the 1960s.

In today's interconnected global village, the idea that there are topics that are "irrelevant" to certain societies is an increasing difficult assertion to maintain.  Vintage American films, Japanese anime, British pop music are as much enjoyed and appreciated in Freetown, Sierra Leone or Georgetown, Guyana as they are in any Western city.  The number of stamps issues per year may make it difficult for collectors raised on the traditional -collect the country- model to keep up with, but personally I do not think these philatelic "rogue states" are harmful in and of themselves,  unless those buying the issues believe they are making an investment that will pay off in the future.  Stamps only are a good investment in terms of leisure time to relax and discover the world. Financially a collector *might* make a financial gain from the expenses put into the hobby over time, with a bit of luck. But more often than not that does not happen. However, I've never really seen any advertising from these agencies touting their productions as an investment tool, something that can not be said for other retail branches within the world of organized philately.

Personally I do not really collect the post-1980 generation of stamps produced by agencies for these "rogue states" - their design ethos for me is just not appealing - but I can see how they can become a "gateway" to attract new collectors into the hobby. I think perhaps a bit less "pooh-pooh"-ing of the issues and a bit more outreach to these casual collectors to show them the vast variety and diversity of the hobby would be a wiser approach when these issues come up for discussion.