Hugo Arpin, Author at The Stamp Echo

Inverted Jenny Plate Block breaks US Record!

October 27, 2014 by Hugo Arpin

Last month one of the very few infamous inverted Jenny plate block (#Scott C3a) was sold and it set a new US philatelic record. The block sold for more than $4.8 million, becoming the second most expensive stamp in the world, just after the 1856 1¢ Magenta British Guiana who sold for $9.48 million this summer (see our article on this subject).

The sale was conducted by Mr. Sundman of Mystic Stamp and was a complete shot out of the dark. In fact he was planning to exhibit the stamp when he received an unexpected offer that he could not refuse. The phone call took place in late september and the buyer requested anonymity.

British Guiana 1¢ Magenta Breaks World Record!

June 26, 2014June 23, 2014 by Hugo Arpin

Last June 17th, the British Guiana 1¢ Magenta was put on auction at Sotheby’s in New York. This stamp is considered by many to be the world’s rarest. Well, if we look at the British Guiana in terms of monetary value, this stamp is now definitely the most valuable, since its selling price has just set a new world record.

The record-shattering amount of US$9.48 million was the winning bid. The stamp was sold over the phone to a bidder who chooses to remain anonymous.

Arpin Philately is safe from Heartbleed security bug

April 9, 2014 by Hugo Arpin

As soon as the Heartbleed bug was announced in the morning news of April 9th 2014, the servers of arpinphilately.com were immediately checked. Good news, it turns out that all our servers are totally safe from this threat.

All servers of Arpin Philately are scanned daily, by McAfee Secure to make sure it passes their strict security tests, which help protect you from identity theft, viruses, spyware, and other online threats. Security is very important for us!

Brigham Auctions just sold the rarest stamp of Canada!

March 11, 2014February 27, 2014 by Hugo Arpin

The finest known copy canada stamps #32 — The sold copy

Last february 22nd Brigham sold their Large Queens collection, which was in all likelihood the most complete collection of its kind. In it was the infamous Scott #32, the green 2¢ Large Queen on laid paper. There is only 3 known copies of this stamp (the third copy was discovered last year) and the one in question is so far the finest known. The 2014 Unitrade catalogue estimated this Used Fine copy at $250,000, Brigham Auctions were estimating that the copy would sell for $900,000. The winning bid was finally $475,000, not so bad for a single stamp!

Canada Stamps Now Available in Year Sets

March 17, 2014January 20, 2014 by Hugo Arpin

One of the biggest challenge in philately is to find the stamps to fill your album pages. Practically every albums (Lighthouse, Davo, Unity, etc.) list their stamps by year and they can’t use the Scott classification, because the copyright belongs to Scott. We do get a lot of request like: “I need all the stamps of the year 1996 to fill my Lighthouse album”. So this can be quite a challenge to retrieve every stamps you need and then pick them one by one.

That’s why we felt the need to create Year Sets. So now it can as easy as one click to retrieve all the stamps you need for a given year.