Armand Rousso in the Bridgeport Post

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

The ones he took to a Chinese restaurant owner he befriended bought him and his cronies countless meals.
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 data base 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 stamps, 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.

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

Each stamp sent to the Stamp Exchange is stored in one of the 2,800 vaults, he said. They are appraised and graded by experts employed by Rousso according to a system similar to coin classification. That information, along with the asking price, in entered into the computer.

“Organized philately does not look with great favor on what Mr. Rousso is doing, “ said Peter Robertson, curator of the Philatelic Foundation in New York. “Stamp collecting is a hobby. It can be a money-making hobby. But basically, it is a hobby.”

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.