Fritz Billig

Fritz F. Billig (1902–1986) 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.

[2] 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.

[3][4] He appeared in the 1938 Blue Book of Philately where his address was given as 1 Herreng 6/4, Vienna, Austria,[5] however, he was forced to flee to the United States after the Anschluss where he continued his career in Jamaica, New York.

[6] 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[6] 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.

A Fritz Billig bookplate