By Michael Schreiber - Linn's Stamps News
We are pleased to introduce stamp dealer David M. Kols as Linn's new Stamp Market Tips columnist. Kols' first column appears on page 62.
|
| Figure 1. David Kols, president of Regency Stamps Ltd., is Linn's new Stamp Market Tips columnist. |
Kols, president of Regency Stamps Ltd. of St. Louis, assumes the mantle worn by legendary Chicago dealer John G. Ross, who died in early August at age 85.
Figure 1 shows a recent picture of Kols.
Ross wrote the Stamp Market Tips column for nearly 34 years, beginning in Stamps magazine in 1969 and transitioning into the pages of Linn's in 1986.
For decades, the worldly Ross operated a street-level retail shop just off Chicago's busy Loop area. The energetic Kols keeps a similar shop in the heart of St. Louis' historic Central West End, a shopping and dining mecca.
The Regency Stamps street address is 229 North Euclid Ave., and Kols calls it the firm's "flagship store" and "a veritable museum for the stamp collector and the St. Louis historian buff."
Kols, a stamp collector since early childhood, came to stamp dealing literally out of nowhere in 1992, the year he changed the name of his business from Mississippi Computer Corp. to Regency Stamps Ltd.
Incorporated in 1984 when Kols was in his early 30s, Mississippi Computer provided software to the wholesale travel industry.
Kols changed his business at about the time that travel was on the verge of being revolutionized by the widening Internet and the public's embracing of it.
Since 1992, Kols has opened three stamp stores (at the North Euclid address beginning in May, moving from two previous addresses), conducted 32 public stamp auctions (the first in 1994), provided the impetus for the birth in 1993 of the highly successful annual St. Louis Stamp Expo and begun Regency's StampHall.com auction web site.
 |
| Figure 2. Recent postmark from the contract postal unit at Regency Stamps' retail stamp shop in St. Louis. |
In 2002, the company's total sales should approach $6 million.
StampHall.com offers the company's own stamps (some covers) and those of dealer affiliates in a weekly auction similar to eBay, except that online bidding on all lots ends each Tuesday at 6 p.m. All lots are shipped from Regency on one invoice.
Concurrent with this Oct. 21 issue of Linn's, weekly online auction No. 124 is in progress at StampHall.com.
Regency is an official auctioneer at the American Philatelic Society's Stampshow. The firm is also the official auctioneer at the St. Louis Stamp Expo.
Kols has a bachelor's degree in economics (Lehigh University, 1972), and his approach to the fun hobby of stamps is all business. His new shop includes a U.S. Postal Service contract philatelic window to attract collectors of new-issue U.S. stamps.
While in the shop to buy new issues, these collectors (the auction buyers of tomorrow) will see facets of the stamp hobby and the stamp business that the local post office can not offer.
After 10 years in the retail stamp business, Kols is highly qualified to write Stamp Market Tips. He knows what makes the market work, as a shop keeper, a public auctioneer and an online vendor.
Kols' first few stamp tips are a popular $1 U.S. classic and an Argentine zeppelin set. His Tip of the Week is Great Britain's classic Postal Union Congress stamp of 1929.