Stamp Collecting for Beginners and Philatelists
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Sociable Stamp Society
This is our blog for current stamp news and views of interest to the philatelist and beginner. Daily updates provide items on shows, new issues, events, what's selling, and timely facts.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
GS Day
Thursday is the end of the week here and a day to cleanup and look ahead in the belief that there really is no time like the present to start. Let’s start with in house topics at Glassine Surfer.I) GS Meta
a) Stamp Questions. Even a small website like this runs gets stacks of questions. Most of them are about the value of stamps, which I have answered online. But I answer other questions all the time.
b) Stamp Links. Websites move, and come and go every day. Updating links is a big job, and I need a better solution than my hand’s on method. Any suggestions?
c) Stories and information. Be my focus group. What should I write about for you? Suggestions warmly appreciated.
II) 10 Reasons to Collect Stamps
1. Stamps help you from coming unhinged. Stamps take you away from the daily grind, reduce stress, and keep you out of trouble.
2. Stamps boost your I.Q. seven percent and make you seem smart even if you’re really just in it for the little pictures.
3. Stamps are handy reasons to explain the sudden loss of $259 at poker.
4. Stamp collectors are rebellions and independent free thinkers.
5. Stamp shows are handy excuses not to attend your cousin’s bbq, or take the weekend off from chores.
6. Stamps inform and educate and help collectors win trivia games and bar bets.
7. Stamp collectors are wiser than coin collectors and infinitely smarter than card collectors.
8. Stamps collections satisfy the urge to create something good.
9. Stamps attract beautiful women.
10. Stamp collectors are friendly, smart, happy and funny.
the lanai guy | 12:29 PM | 1 comments |
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The Practical Philatelist
One of my many changes in the last couple of years has been my switch from packrat to practical traveler.
I used to save everything that may have been useful sometime in the future. It was handy to have lots of things around to use in a pinch. Things like old bookcases, old margarine containers, or stacks of books on curious topics.
But, but, I learned that I spent a lot of time keeping up with the clutter. That was time that I should have focused on more important things. (Yes, it’s also about priorities.)
It’s odd to be looking back with this new attitude of a someone who’s traveling light, to wonder why that little old packrat (me) didn’t see that he was dragging around a large ball and chain.
It’s an odd feeling, but I don’t dwell on it. And now I’m ordering another Dumpster to be dropped off so I can fill it with the packrat’s junky treasures.
I’ve also started to apply this new outlook to my stamp collection. I have stacks of auction catalogs, cartons of unsoaked stamps, and bits and pieces of philately that I’ve bought here and there over the years on a whim. Now I’m zeroing in on what feels right, what’s important, and what I want to do with my collection.
I have a handful of specialties that I am psychically drawn to. (I mean, these are areas that I’m drawn to with the slightest hint of a connection no matter what else I’m doing, or what the connection may be.) There’s a connection that may have started as an intellectual or historical interest, but has seeped deeper.
I don’t think they’re in any way related other than through me.
The first area is the issues of Hawaii. A bit more of an abstract longing than the rest (because I can’t afford most of them), but it runs deeply. I like the designs, their stories, their provenance, Hawaii itself, and, the relation to the notion of a vanished Paradise. (The only paradise is paradise lost. - Marcel Proust)
Another collecting fascination for me is Finland, specifically the 1918 definitive of the rampant lion within a field of colored waves. These are the Saarinen issues, and for the era the design was cutting edge. No old men in ties, or scenes of glory. It’s the design, and this issue drew me in to learn more and more about Suomi. I have Finnish music from WWII and took language lessons for a year or so.
The US Fourth Bureau definitive issue is a bit closer to home. When I started collecting I sorted 17 million of them into little piles (or at least it felt like millions). They were history lessons, the best dead-president’s issue there ever was.
And not lastly, French Colonial Africa tops my list for philatelic adventure, and to this I’ve also grafted the Belgian Congo. In a sense, this is my more whimsical area.
The Hawaiians are longing and aspiration. The Finns are flyspec’ers, art and design. The Fourths are personal landmarks, and the French are capricious fun.
the lanai guy | 12:11 PM | 0 comments |
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Sociable Stamp Society
This is a philately people blog. It’s about you and your stories from the philatelic world, sort of a social stamp blog --- which harkens back to the old days when this site had a chat room called the “Sociable Stamp Society.”In fact, I’ll be changing the name of this column to the “Sociable Stamp Society” because nothing makes more sense than clarity.
All around, we know that person-to-person stamp collecting is best. Two people meet. They trade and swap stamps. They answer each other’s questions about their specialties and wants, passing on tip and suggestions. It doesn’t get much better than that and along the way they’re both the wiser. (The questioner learns from the teacher who hones his knowledge honing his answers.) And heck, we can never have too many friends.
Anything stamps is fair game for note and comment, even new stamp issues, which I’m not very keen on these last two decades.
There was a time I followed the release of the postal system’s new annual schedule, and quibbled about them: too many stamps, too many frivolous ones, commemorable events shunned, designs from hell, fouled-up data and ideas. It was to no avail. The USPS has a bottom line and it means printing a sales price on small pieces of paper on more and more “products.”
If I’d wanted to collect cereal boxes or cartons of waste paper, I would have, but I collect stamps that matter, that are reminders of history and their impact upon average and not so average people's lives.
The reason for stamps was better communication. If the stamp issue’s primary use isn’t connecting people, thoughts, and ideas, it’s just pricey paper, and if we had a classics era that ended after 1945, the dead stamp era began around 1990.
Excuse the rant, but the only reason I can see to pick up any new issues is for a topical reason so you can collect as many Elvis-things or Dinosaurs on stamps as you like.
Today’s dead stamps aren’t part of the history of philately but rather new novelties patriotically marketed to addicted collectors. As you can see, I’m a re-constructed 12-stepper in this regard, and something of a proselytizing missionary too.
the lanai guy | 10:15 AM | 0 comments |
Monday, August 13, 2007
Here and There and Back Again.
I’m back.Mike Mills, the Glassine Surfer, is back.I was away for much too long, and it feels good to be here. It feels great to be back where I belong.
About two years ago, I gave up writing my ‘Glassine Surfer’ column for the APS magazine and I stopped contributing my USA column to ‘Gibbons Stamp Monthly.’
I stopped updating the website and I dropped out of most stamp activities. I actually stopped all my stamp activities, even buying and accumulating items for my collections.
There were reasons for all of this. I was the victim of my habits. I was stressed, overworked. I had health issues, like amazingly high blood pressure, and long bouts of insomnia. Depression was diagnosed. I felt like goldfish swimming in a fishbowl, or a mega-star checking into a clinic for exhaustion, but at the time it was worse than that.
In the last two years, I wound up ending a 25-year marriage, losing my best friend, since I was 16, to alcohol, and coping with reduced finances (ouch!). But medication, zen, and exercise has put me on my feet, and now the Rx’s are being phased out.
I wound up being vegetarian, finding out I’d been buddha’ish all my life, connecting with my self, and reigniting that that wonderful spark of life. I even found someone to love, and so did she but it wasn’t me (a very long story).
Through it all I just held on and had faith in my friends, and family, doctor and counselor. And now I slowly look back over my shoulder and find it hard to believe that what is so clear now was utterly unimaginable then.
That’s where I’ve been and what a long strange trip it’s been. Like I said, I’m back and I’ll be here for the next 25 years when printed stamps are considered antiquities and viewed as quaint reminders of life gone by.
All this may seem too personal for a blog and site about “stamp collecting,” but it’s also the direction this blog, this website, and I are taking.
the lanai guy | 8:25 AM | 1 comments |
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