I have just received word from Dave Akin, Senior Editor, Scott Publishing Co., that many of the suggested changes to the listings of Korean stamps in the Scott Stamp Catalogue have been made for the 2015 edition. These changes have been listed on the KSS website for some time in our effort to get Scott to make the changes. In addition to the changes made, there are additional changes suggested that will be incorporated for the 2016 catalogue as soon as they can be documented with full size pictures.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Harry Penn, our webmaster, for his persistence in bringing these needed changes to the attention of the Korean philately community and for helping Scott to get the record correct. If you see any additional changes that should be made, please let me know, and I will be sure that Harry gets them for listing on our website. Our hobby is based on catalogue accuracy, so anything we can do to improve the accuracy of the record will improve the hobby.
With our move out of our house in St. Paul and into an apartment there, I have sent almost all of my Korean material to the Western Philatelic Library. If you are looking for a Korean philatelic reference, it is likely that they will have it. I encourage you to take advantage of our resources as held by the library.
I have also just been offered a six-month appointment in the Graduate Business School of the International Islamic University of Malaysia as a ”Renowned Scholar (no, you don’t have to bow down before me!). The term will run from June 11 to December 13. I already have all of my stamps and references that I kept in a secured storage container during this time, which might make my job as your editor a little more challenging. But we do have lots of material; I just need to find the time, with John Talmage, to keep the issues coming.
I also have received a lot of material from Robert Collins with Korean War covers that were not in the monograph that we published. I also have several scans from our archives. We are considering doing an addendum to the monograph with the new covers not previously included. This will be very time consuming, but, while I am in Malaysia, I won’t be consulting, so I should have time to work on it there.
You may recall that my wife has been battling tongue cancer since 2010. For a good part of 2011, I did close to full-time care. As a result, many of your e-mails got put into a folder or even ignored. I apologize for that. Now, however, my wife is coming up on three years cancer free. We are now in Hawaii vacationing in preparation for some “apart time” while I am in Malaysia (Lynn will be with me for some of the time, but not all of it). As a result, I have had a chance to work at cleaning out my files.
Many of the items I have found are items for the “Letters to the Editor.” This has resulted in a very long Letters to the Editor section. I have decided that we will go with the full file, which more than makes up the equivalent of an issue. So, John and I have decided to run this issue as a double issue, as we did once before. I anticipate that I will be able to stay on top of things now, so long as everything continues to go well for Lynn.
This double issue has used up a lot of material, so I am back encouraging each of you to think about how you can contribute to future issues – either through a letter or an article, brief or lengthy.
We do acknowledge in this issue the loss of two of our long-time contributing members. Their obituaries follow this Editorial.
(Image used in this online article: copyright KoreaPost.)
