Howard Piltz

Mainline Railway Stamps - A handy reference book

As a stamp collector, I know that many people specialise in what are called thematic collections rather than collect a particular country. There are many reasons for this, but one is that it follows some of the other interests of the collector. One of those thematic areas is railways, trains in particular and how they are represented across the world.

Mainline Railway Stamps is the latest reference book, on an interesting area of collecting, and the book contains some fantastic information. Not only does this book focus the British Isles but around the world, and the author Howard Piltz has split this down in to the various continents as well as explaining about collecting. How this thematic collecting has the ability to widen your world knowledge as a by-product of studying the subject.

Plitz quite sensibly explains some of the basics of collecting, especially for those that are new to philately. So that the reader has a broader understanding of the various ways that railways stamps have been issued and how you may wish to purchase them to start your collection.

The book has been well research, well written, and with some excellent pictures of many railway stamps from around the world. I can see a number of stamps which I have in my collection and I am not a railways specialist. This is a handy reference book for the seasoned collector and the beginner alike, a book which I can highly recommend.… (mer)

One of Ian Allan's landscape-format 'Heyday' series, this book consists of - well, pictures of trolleybuses. Not much there for the non-anorak, then, you'd think. Well, think again. In the days depicted in these pictures, public transport was considered to be a demonstration of civic pride and public service, whether privately or publicly owned. Bus liveries were (usually) colourful but not garish, and owed more to the coachbuilding tradition than graphic design. Rampant commercialism, in the form of overall advertising, was unknown. And so often, the pictures show not only the buses but the streets they travelled through, with period detail that shows us the world of just a few decades ago, now gone forever.

Picture quality is usually reasonable, though a few slightly fuzzy pictures make it past the cut for their historical interest. Given that colour films were fairly slow until the 1970s, the results are more than acceptable. Then again, we're rather spoilt these days with high-resolution digital...

One irritation is that many of the photographs have no comment about the location or the surroundings; sometimes, these can be as interesting as the subject matter of the picture itself.

Strange that the UK abandoned a clean, quiet and environmentally sound means of transport and would now like to get back to it...… (mer)