Monthly Archives: October 2012

It is a love of stamps that takes the collecting impulse that is found in many of us and transforms the person into an ardent philatelist. The collector reads all he can about the hobby and, in the typical trajectory, goes from a more general type of collecting to specializing. The philatelic experience involves searching (dealers stocks, Ebay, the internet, philatelic auctions) in the hopes of finding items that are just right for your collection within the structure that you have used to define your collection, (US Fancy Cancels, German Pneumatic Post or whatever).

Counterintuitively,  the very needs and skills that make collecting such a pleasurable experience tend to mitigate against turning your hobby into your profession. Collectors spend enjoyable hours searching for material that is just right for their collections. Dealers who duplicate that process for acquiring stock find that their inventory is too sparse and too specialized. The great pleasure in

Philately has always been a cold weather hobby. Its popularity nation to nation and region to region has always increased south to north with the highest concentrations of serious collectors where it is the coldest and darkest. The reasons are clear- a warm cup of hot chocolate, a stamp album and some new additions to mount are a nice way to spend a cold a blustery winter's evening. There are other reasons too-paper doesn't keep so well in warm sticky climates and literacy and reading rates which are good predictors of philatelic interest are higher in northern countries. And we see collector rates getting higher and higher the further from the equator that we move. Philately has always been a major hobby in Scandinavia but even within countries the rate of stamp collecting increases as you move from the warmer parts of the country to the colder. In Germany, probably the most philatelically

Today was a more or less typical day. I had nine smaller collections to work on. These were stamp groups that had been sent to our office by collectors and which we had purchased. The first was a mixed quality United States group sent by a life long collector who was pruning some of the poorer quality stamps that he had bought when he was a younger collector to create funds to upgrade the quality of his stamps. The next group I worked on was some better US that the owner was selling to get some money for a vacation that he and his wife wanted to take. The third was a small group of French stampless covers that the owner didn't know where he had gotten, but they probably came in an old auction lot that he had purchase long ago and they didn't fit in with anything that he currently collected. Another collection was a seventeen volume expanded Harris worldwide collection with over 100,000 different stamps in it and that the owner had laboriously cataloged and inventoried to the last

The stamp dealers of the older generation had a fair number of odd characters but none were odder than Morton Paul Goldfarb. Mort, as everyone called him, went to every auction, every stamp show and no matter where you went, you were sure to see him too. Mort specialized in the stamps of the United Nations and only UN. There aren't many better UN stamps in which to deal and Mort made a specialty out of buying and selling UN postage. The United Nations postal agency is really not a post office at all. UN stamps are souvenirs and the UN maintains a Post Office as kind of a postal fiction. All letters deposited at the UN Post Office are turned over to the United States Post Office which is required by Congress to handle UN deposited mail. It is another US subsidy of the UN. The USPS provides the service and the UN gets the revenue for the sale of the postage.

But to make the burden on the United State Post Office less, the UN has always restricted how their Post Office

Book readers sort into two main groups: the first looks at each volume as a challenge to be surmounted. Starting on page one, this group reads page by page until they are done, stopping for other activities but only reading one book at a time. Other readers are more casual about reading, often reading many books simultaneously, alternating between fiction and non fiction as the mood hits and as time allows.

Stamps collectors too fall into these broad categories. Many are one one country or one specialty collectors and they spend significant time and money creating fine collections of their area. The rewards for this kind of collecting temperament is the sense of accomplishment that comes from devoting all your energies to one goal and attaining that goal to the best of your abilities. But the other model for collecting, where you have multiple areas of interest, and move back and forth depending on mood works well too. And collectors of many differing areas find that that

Many people have very strong political opinions. Their positions seem reasonable and well reasoned to them and they have trouble understanding how any thoughtful person could come up with a different opinion.  Even people with less strong views on the issue of whether or not our society is going to come to an end if one or the other party gets into (or continues in power) get hyped up near election time. Its hard not to have a choice in the Super Bowl, even if you are not a football fan.

I have reviewed stamp auction realizations, society membership rolls, magazine subscriptions and the collective memories and wisdom (such as it is) of philatelic old timers and am happy to let you know that you can vote your conscience next month. There is no association between either a Democratic or Republican victory in Presidential elections that seems to have any effect on our hobby. The popularity of philately ebbs and flows but as far as I can make out the rates