About the Author

Louis Basel was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 28, 1926. His parents John and Aspasia were born in Asia Minor of Greek ancestry and emigrated to the United States in the early 1900’s. His father served honorably in the United States Army in World War I.

The author served in the United States Navy as an Aviation Electronics Technician from 1944 to 1946. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1949 and a Master of Science degree in the same discipline in 1950. In the same year, he was married to Penelope Giatrelis whose parents emigrated to the United States from the island of Mytilene, Greece. Louis and Penelope have two children John and Peter, and three grandsons, Louis Hong, Paul Thomas and Peter Louis Jr.

His professional experience includes: Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee where he worked on liquid metal heat transfer from nuclear reactors, United Engineers & Constructors in Philadelphia where he worked on the design of chemical plants and Crawford & Russell in Stamford, Connecticut where he was President until he retired in 1984. The latter company built chemical plants in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Japan and Singapore. Crawford & Russell was sold to John Brown Ltd. of London England in 1979 and is presently owned by Kvaerner Consolidated of Norway.

The author’s philatelic activities began in the mid 1970’s when he decided to add to his son John’s abandoned collection of Greek stamps. He soon joined the Hellenic Philatelic Society of America in New York city where he was advised to purchase a copy of the Etude of Tryphon Constantindes. This book, published in 1933 in Greek and French, had never been translated into English. The author published his translation in 1978. This started a 25 year period of research in the Large Hermes Head stamps of Greece with many publications in Hellenic philatelic journals in the United States, Greece, Great Britain, Germany and The Netherlands.

In 1980, he purchased an IBM personal computer and thought that it could be a useful tool for philatelic purposes. His first effort was writing a program for the creation of an index to philatelic articles in the Greek journal Philotelia. This was probably the first use of a computer for the indexing of philatelic articles. His next endeavor was writing a program for the computerized plating of the 20 lepta Large Hermes Head stamps. This too was the first use of computers in philatelic research of this kind. The author’s article describing this work appeared in The American Philatelist in 1985 and won the Apfelbaum Award for the best article published in that journal in 1985. In 2001, he published a comprehensive book on the ten lepta Large Hermes Heads of Greece which was followed by the present text on the forty lepta in 2004.The author continues his philatelic research in his retirement as an interesting and satisfying activity.