Poster Stamp Collectors Club
Established 2004
APS #255
Mission Statement for the Club and Website
- To popularize collecting and to foster understanding of the Poster Stamp.
- To serve as an introduction for beginners and as an educational resource for experienced collectors.
- To be a long-term archive of historical and scholarly content.
- To serve as a communications hub for the Poster Stamp collecting community, drawing the like-minded together.
History of The Poster Stamp Collectors Club
The PSCC was formed after an informal national meeting in Saint Louis in 2004. Since then there have been 8 national meetings. Membership dues are $24.00 per year, due the first of the year, and reduced in cost for those who join late in the year.
From 2006 to 2016 a quarterly bulletin The Journal of the Poster Stamp Collectors Club was published; the editor was President Art Groten. Those issues are now archived and indexed on the website, for members only; some example pages are viewable by anyone.
We became affiliate #255 of the American Philatelic Society in 2007, and an affiliate of the American Topical Association. The web site was first created in 2011.
As of June 2022, the PSCC merged with the journal Poster Stamp Bulletin and its membership base. The Poster Stamp Bulletin has become the “official organ” of the PSCC. The Bulletin will continue to mail 6 issues per year, and to hold mail sales of Cinderella material to members at least 3 times a year. Recent issues of the Bulletin can be found viewable for members in the Library section of the site.
The Poster Stamp Bulletin was founded as a monthly by the late Walter Schmidt in November 1994, and Walter began the issues using the club name Poster Stamp Society of America, but by 1996, he dropped that club name and consistently used Poster Stamp Bulletin from then on. With Walter’s illness and death in 2020, Joseph Ward and Nicholas Follansbee continued the PSB, with Joe as major editor. Both were close friends of Walter and had been helping him with the PSB for some time before that. In 2021 they decided to issue only on a bimonthly schedule, at the beginning of February, April, June, August, October, and December. During most of the other 6 months Joe had been sending out a mail sale selection of material for purchase.
Issues of 1994 to 2021 [completed in 2023] are gradually being archived and indexed. The archive is open for members only.
Although the Bulletin was not a true club, Walter referred to it as the Poster Stamp Society of America, in a continuation of an earlier national club that had ended about 1984 run by the late Ewald van Elkin.
There are a series of national level poster stamp collecting clubs that have existed since the golden era of 1912-1915, with many gaps of years with no club. On the website Alphabetilately one can find scanned issues of the same name, The Poster Stamp Bulletin, outlet of the National Poster Stamp Society, covering the years 1936 to 1951. That club is of course long gone, and in later years it was, as Bill Senkus says, an outlet for a printing company and its products rather than a true club.
PSSC National Meetings of Collectors in the USA in recent years:
2004 February; St. Louis, MO, at the St. Louis Stamp Exposition, by invitation of the Poster Stamp Bulletin
2006 September; Philadelphia, PA. Phildelphia National Stamp Expo.
2008 August; Hartford, CN. APS Stampshow.
2009 September; Albany, NY. StampExpo 400
2011 Boxborough, MA
2012 May; Portland, OR Pipex
2013 May; Boxborough, MA Philatelic Show
2014 St. Louis MO St. Louis Stamp Expo
2016 New York, NY International Stamp Show
