Fritz Billig


Fritz F. Billig was a Viennese philatelist and stamp dealer who fled to the United States after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and continued his career from Jamaica, New York. There he published a successful and long-running series of philatelic handbooks that are still regularly referred to by philatelists today.

Life in Austria

Fritz F. Billig was born in 1902. He was a philatelist, stamp dealer, and philatelic author and with Otto E. Stiedl produced a 44 part handbook of philatelic forgeries between 1933 and 1938. He began to publish his handbook on postmarks in German which was continued in English from volume 8 in 1949. Publications by Billig won a silver medal at the Jubilee exhibition in Budapest 1934, the Prize of Honor at NABA Zurich 1934 and a bronze medal at OSTROPA 1935.
In 1936 he founded and was the editor of the Mondial index to philatelic literature which was published loose-leaf in three languages and ran to over 200 pages before it was abandoned. He appeared in the 1938 Blue Book of Philately where his address was given as 1 Herreng 6/4, Vienna, Austria, however, he was forced to flee to the United States after the Anschluss where he continued his career in Jamaica, New York.

United States

In the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, Billig temporarily changed his name to Fritz Billings in order to avoid the anti-German sentiment current at the time and traded as the Billings Stamp Co. His former partner in Vienna, Fred Rich, joined Billig in New York in 1945 and they operated the auction firm of Billig & Rich Inc. at 55 West 42nd Street in New York.
From 1939 he began to publish Billig's Specialized Catalogues which eventually ran to 11 volumes, and from 1942, Billig's Philatelic Handbooks which reached 44 volumes.

Later life

In the late 1960s, the firm of HJMR Co. of Miami Beach, Florida, succeeded to Billig's business and reprinted the Billig Handbooks. Billig died in 1986.

Publications as author or publisher