Armand Rousso in the Star Banner

Rousso learned early on that some stamps were worth more than their postage.

“I used them like currency, “ said Rousso, 35, who began collecting stamps at age 10. “It was very tough trading stamps for property. I had to make the right person interested in them.”

Rousso, who now lives in Palm Beach, is hoping to get even more people interested in the $470 million-a-year business, but not through trades in small shops, auction houses or other traditional means. He wants to bring the art of stamp collecting into the computer age with his fledging International Stamp Exchange Corp.
Rousso’s concept is to provide through the Stamp Exchange an elaborate database that stamp aficionados can tap into-a computerized ticker tape of minute-by-minute prices for thousands of stamps.

So far, hundreds of thousands of stamp, worth tens of millions of dollars in Scott’s Catalog value have been sent to the Stamp Exchange for inclusion in the computer network, he said. He hopes to have trading underway in December.

“We’re still entering stamps in the computer, “he said. “We have complete sets of stamps from Europe, South America, English colonies, Canada, the United States…”

Rousso estimates that after the system is complete, the Stamp Exchange ultimately will link about 500 dealers with more than 20 million collectors worldwide.

Rousso, who also has been criticized in the past for using his stamps to buy expensive items countered: “The conservative stamp collectors don’t like me because they want to keep things between themselves. But I’m making it more attractive to the newcomer.”