Monthly Archives: February 2018

The world was very different in 1960 than it is today. The universe was only four billion years old, a considerable age but adolescent compared to the nearly 14 billion years astronomers think it is today. Black holes hadn't been theorized or discovered. There was less documentation to prove evolution, as DNA had only been worked out a few years before. No one had been to the moon. No one had color television sets. I Love Lucy hadn't been replaced by Snookie and J-Wow. Making a phone call meant sitting down in your home and dialing. There were no computers and Internet and philatelists reading articles like this would be holding newspapers in their hands. And mail meant stamps. The world around us is very different than it was when the Baby Boomers were kids.

But the stamp world has changed very little in the last fifty years. True, most collectors buy their

Probably nine out of ten philatelic forgeries were created in the nineteenth century. There were three primary reasons for this. First, stamps that were issued in the earliest period (before there were many stamp collectors) never existed in sufficient quantities in even the limited market by 1890. Second, early philatelic standards did not view forgeries the way we do today. Many early collectors were glad to have a “reproduction”, or a “reprint,” as they were euphemistically called, in their collection when they couldn't afford the genuine. And third, the consolidation of the German and Italian States in the late nineteenth century into the great nation states of Germany and Italy left twenty or so stamp issuing entities (that had issued many rare stamps that collectors desired) without government agencies to police counterfeits of their stamps. The stamps had been demonetized, and so, from a government point of view, counterfeits were a nuisance, not a revenue

Preprinted labels as collected by philatelists come in three broad categories: postage stamps, revenues, and Cinderellas. Postage stamps are collected by all philatelists. They are the major stamp issues of each country and are issued for the prepayment of postage. Postage Stamps are listed in many major worldwide catalogs. Collecting postage stamps has a long history and is very popular. Revenues are stamps that are issued to pay taxes, not postage. However, some countries allow the use of some stamps for both purposes; when this happens, the stamps are called Postal Fiscals and are collected by stamp collectors either mint or with postal, not revenue, cancels. Revenue collecting was once very popular and rivaled postage stamp collecting. It is very much of a niche area of the hobby now. Outside of the US philatelic domain, collecting of Revenue stamps is very unusual.

In all the many ways that the hobby of stamp collecting has changed in the last 50 years, probably the most significant has been in the de-emphasis of the "great buy" that was at the heart of philatelic writing in previous generations. Everyone wants a good deal and to get what they pay for (and maybe a little more), but most collectors today are happy to get good value when they buy and don't hope to find an Airmail Invert every time they go to the post office. This change is more significant than most may think because it has happened slowly. Fully half of Pat Herst's great book "Nassau Street" written in 1960 is about great deals that he made. And while the stories are interesting, they are his great deals, not ours, so our interest after a while seems a bit prurient and his ethical standards somewhat low. Oddly, Herst's ethics were considered sterling in his day, but by modern standards he seems to have cut ethical corners and often engaged in questionable promotions and deals that

The movie Hyde Park on the Hudson is the first mainstream movie in years in which stamps and stamp collecting play a major part. The movie is about Roosevelt in the late 1930s at his summer home in Hyde Park, and Roosevelt is portrayed as a person to whom his stamps are very important. He shows his collection to his future mistress, to the visiting King George VI, and seems to go to his stamps for succor during his most stressful times in the movie.

One of the great stories in cryptology over the last 200 years was working out the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was the Egyptian writing of the old dynasties (the ones that had built the pyramids). The writing had fallen out of use and been replaced by different alphabets so that by the beginning of the common era (about two thousand years ago) there was no one left who knew how to read hieroglyphic writing. Throughout the next 1800 years, scholarly interpretations of this writing— and there are thousands of walls and obelisks with tens of thousands of lines of hieroglyphic surviving— ranged from the idea that the writing had no meaning at all as writing but was religious decoration to purely imaginary reconstructions of what the modern "scholars" wanted the hieroglyphics to say. The great breakthrough in understanding the real meaning of hieroglyphic writing came with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. The stone carried a long government proclamation

Early cars had mechanical crank starters. They didn't work very well, were hard to use, and required the strength of a good sized man to turn them. In cold weather they sometime "kicked", breaking the hand of the person trying to start his car. Yet even after electric starters were invented, for many years cars were equipped with both the newer starters and the older type. People were used to one thing, and even when something better came along they were reluctant to change. Such is the case now with stamp auction catalogs.

Like Germany, Japan was devastated as a result of WWII. American bombing had destroyed industrial production, and the war had killed a high percentage of young adult males. Many homes were in ruins, and the electric and telecommunications grid was annihilated. Like Germans, the Japanese are an energetic and frugal people, and by the 1960s, fifteen years after the end of hostilities, Japan had largely rebuilt and was on its way to reemerging as one of the industrial powers of the world. The Japanese poured their export earnings into technology and universities and infrastructure, but unlike the Germans, the Japanese never really got into stamps.

Get a group of sixty year old doctors together, and you are sure to hear complaints about managed care and capitation and MBAs that get between doctors and patients. Lawyers have similar issues. People in the printing and publishing business lament the Internet. And independent booksellers now all seem to work for Barnes and Noble for $8 an hour. Every business and avocation has changed dramatically over the last thirty years. Philatelists, with our view of history, should be more understanding of this. Change has always affected all hobbies and occupations. Certainly the Internet and all that technology has opened up to us has dramatically changed our world. But have these changes been more dramatic than the changes that the electrification of the world between 1880 and 1920 caused? Are the changes now more overwhelming than how our lives were altered by the great transportation revolution of 1920-1960 which was facilitated by cars and planes? My daughter lives in California.