Stamp Collecting for Beginners and Philatelists

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Public Arcana

Over the weekend I was downtown enjoying the sun and the breeze. I met someone for lunch and in the course of the next four hours stamp collecting never came up.

That's not surprising because 99% of the breathing public hasn't a clue what we do and every year fewer and fewer people actually use stamps. I thought it over and it seems to me that the topic never came up because it's almost arcana.

It's a conversation stopper. It isn't 'exciting' to the unbaptized, and touting philately might just prompt your re-evaluation as a functional member of the 21^st century.

But after we said good-bye I was on my own kicking around the area when lo and behold I saw a family of tourists wandering the pavement. And one of them had a stamp t-shirt.

It was a enlarged printing of an Icelandic pony complete with perfs, #311 in your catalogues. And I started thinking I had to find myself a suitable stamp t-shirt to wear.

Even on a day when I wasn’t thinking ‘stamps’ I wound up with two long trains of thought and one quest, which I will get to if I can ever stop messing with the stamps at home.

I’m now in the midst of turning old collection items into new ones courtesy of online auctions. I will of course buy a suitable stamp t-shirt somewhere (or make my own) and the next time I’m kicking around on the weekend, I may show up wearing... gosh, I don’t know what stamp I’d wear.

The Inverted Jenny or the Penny Black seems old hat. And I’d like to stay with the USA, but what makes a good t-shirt and what makes a good stamp design are two different things.

the lanai guy | 8:41 PM | 0 comments |  

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