Stamp Collecting for Beginners and Philatelists
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This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.
November 1998
[It's not getting any better.]
In the beginning, say 1992, the Net was a void, a dark silent abyss navigated with handwritten maps, URLs scrawled in notebooks and on Postnotes. (I still have one such ancient tome.) Then the Net said, "Yahoo!" and word became a free directory.
Their scriveners sifted through "include me, too" requests from web sites and selected a few. But soon the 404 virus attacked the directory: Addresses were not found. And the sites that were never submitted were never found at all.
In '95 a Big Bang blew out all the windows, and the Net exploded into a zillion different domains, and now we find ourselves with so much sand and gravel in the machine that we are coming to the end of the Search Engine Age.
Search engines match words without regard to quality, and they seemed like a good idea: Once. These database programs rely on human honesty and accuracy to make a match, but they're losing the game and there are hundreds of ways to trick a search engine.
Some engines are brothers of advertising sites, and since engines are traffic builders for web commerce and charity begins in the home, other factors may be at work when you go out searching. Ziff Davis' online column by Jesse Berst carried a story about shocking secrets.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2432.html
Searching the Net is everyone's least favorite waste of time, but if you're going to do it be armed and forwarned, "Your actual mileage may vary." For a collection of search engines, general and specialized head to the Internet Search Guide:
To learn more about the vaguries of searching read the Search Engine Watch, a gold mine of insights:
http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/webmasters/work.html
The search engine is sump pump. Stick the hose into your flooded basement and you'll get water but little you'd want to drink. My notebook was a good idea then and now, and the best way to find substance in the ether is to find someone who already has.
1b
[After all that]
You still have to search the Net so you may as well get a nifty little tool like the WebFerret to assist you. It's a small Internet utility that lives on your HD. It submits your query to about nine different engines at once and retrieves all the results in its own handy database, which you can also save for future reference.
And the WebFerret is free and works like a charm. Type in your query, request 500 entries, get a sandwich, come back, sort them by URL: click, then just go from Ferret to broswer picking the most likely supsects in your list.
http://www.ferretsoft.com/netferret/
2
[Classroom Stamps]
In Canada, kids can get involved with their history through stamps at Heritage Interactive. It's part of the Heritage Project started in 1991 to heighten awareness of Canada's unique heritage and to celebrate cultural diversity, and started by the Charles R. Bronfman Foudnation,a private family foundation based in Montreal. Available online issues feature stamps and their stoies, including the flag, 1945, Louisbourg, Lunenburg Acamdemy and Canadian Golf, along with many other Canadian resources.
http://heritage.excite.sfu.ca/hpost_e/
3
[Virtual Visual Art]
Ever wonder why some Internet stamp graphics have deep colors and rich visual depth to them and others look as if something is wrong with your monitor? You can learn a lot about the process of scanning at a site like Wayne Fulton's. He has tips on wrangling a good rendition from a scanner, a primer and lots of content to jump start your site's appearance.
4
[No more little pens]
Stamp Tags is a small word processor that lets you write and print tiny tags to slip into stock books and glassines. It has a macro set up for those repepitive phrases like "perf 10½ x 11," and has many of the usual word processor options. This is a shareware blessing.
http://members.aol.com/stamptag/
5a
[Food for Thought]
Cookies are tiny slips of data stored by web sites on a visitor's PC. Typically, it's used to trace repeat visitors to a site, but it also lets other sites know where you have been if they read your cookies. Now engineers at Luckman Interactive in Los Angeles have come up with a program to hide your cookies.
Luckman Interactive's "Anonymous Cookie" software finds your cookies and hides them, so that the user can surf the Web in cognito. The program can also be deactivated with the click of a mouse, restoring your cookies. The program is free and can be downloaded from the Luckman Interactive site.
The site is at:
http://www.luckman.com/
Spam is for different tastes, but Hormel is smiling and learning to live with the noteriety of churning out a product which is now a synonym for unsolicited e-mail. (See, I didn't call it junk e-mail.) Hormel operates the Spam site at
http://www.spam.com.
5b
Want Web Rings with that?
How can blooms of small, hobby sites for Canadian, Commonwealth, Russian and Train stamps and legions of US kitchen table philatelists let surfers know where they are? Try a webring.
A ring is a list of theme-related sites linked back to a keyring-like host, and are very popular with movie and music sites. Each site has a list of options that allows surfers to visit one member after another by clicking on NEXT, or you can see the entire roster of sites by clicking LIST.
Philately has three such rings that I know about. (Please e-mail me about others.) It's another way to find what you want.
Nassau Street
http://www.stampauctions.com/ring/
Stamp Club Ring
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Estates/4272/
Stamp Dealers International Web Ring
http://www.stampdealers.com/
6
[What's Your Passion?]
If your pupils constrict and heart races when I mention, "Sixth Bureau Issue," you are enthralled by the 1954 Liberty Series, and would could blame you for being smitten. These are classic U.S. designs of timeless subjects. The Bureau Issues Association (BIA) 1954 Liberty Series Study Committee has a web site dedicated to expanding the appreciation of the Sixth Bureau Issue of United States, and even if your little philatelic heart is already spoken for, you owe it to yourself to at least look closely at these emissions.
The site is at:
http://members.aol.com/raustin13/studygrp/liberty.htm
8a
[Charades]
Stamps from fake countries are Cinderellas, so web sites of fake countries must be related to the same pranksters.
His Majesty, King Murjel Hermios, Distinguished Monarch of EnenKio Atoll, Paramount Chief, Iroijlaplap of the Northern Atolls of the Ratak Archipelago of Pacific Ocean Islands, his Honorable Ministers and citizens of EnenKio Atoll will greet you at one site.
http://www.enenkio.wakeisland.org/
Or you may wish to visit the site of their Consulate to Brazil.
http://www.uniengland.com/enenkio/enenkioeng.htm
With tongue in cheek ride the current west to the port town of Okusi on the small island of Timor and the Independent Sulatante of Okusi-Ambeno, a small hitherunto unknown nationette that nonetheless maintains mutual aid treaties with Brunei, the Vatican, and the Hutt River Province. Be sure to visit the Philatelic Bureau while you are there.
Either, or, you're in the Twilight Zone.
8b
[Monsieur Felix's Plot]
"Charade" is the 1963 murder-for-money movie with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. In it Mrs. Lampert's hubby is killed, and his ill-gotten money is missing. I found a copy of the movie script and borrowed the video from the library. I thought I would try to identify the stamps that Monsieur Felix shows to Mrs. Lampert, but that, too, was how should we say, un charade.
In the film, stamp dealer Monsieur Felix discusses three stamps. The first is an orange Swedish four skilling issued in 1854, worth a cool $85,000 American in 1963-dollars, when a buck was a buck and a cigar was a good smoke. The second stamp is a three cent Hawaiian Blue of 1894 (actually blue printed on white paper) whose previous owner was murdered. It is worth said to be worth $65,000.
Felix saves the best for last and proclaims the famous "Gazette Moldav," a square piece of colored paper printed with a circle of Cyrillic letters and bearing the initials of the printer, as the world's most valuable stamp. It looks like a real doctored Moldavian. Value: $100,000. But how he strayed from the script.
In the script Felix describes four stamps. The first he says is a red two cent Maurtius that is worth $30,000. Our heroine Audrey thinks it's orange, but offers no estimate of value. The second stamp Felix calls the "1894 Hawaiian Blue." It is, he says, one of seven and has a history of murder amoung its collectors. Cost: $45,000. The next is a four skilling, yellow Swedish issue from 1854 worth then-$65,000 with a clean record. Finally, the Grail of all stamps is the handprinted green "Gazette Guyanne" of 1852, fetching $100,000 at its last transaction.
Felix was fast and loose with the facts and changed his story to suit the occasion. Charade, indeed. "Charade Part Two" will have to deal with that missing fourth stamp because there's a good chance Monsieur Felix was not a dealer but an "imposteur." [MM note: "imposteur" is the French]
http://us.imdb.com/Title?Charade+(1963)
8c
[Bureaus Online]
Postal administrations have moved onto the Net in a big way, but each with their own style, dependant upon their own inner workings.
Some are thoughtful, dynamic and informative presenatations, and some were not worth the loading time; some are like a magazine rack, some like the public library; some arbitrary some well planned. Three of the more interesting you should see are the USA, Austria and Tunisia.
The USA's marketing sales division has a large kiosk to browse, and new issue collectors probably know it well. The nifty thing is the quality graphics of current issues and the feeling that things will only get better.
Over in Austria the PTT has a German-English site that covers a wide range of services along with their Philatelic Bureau. They display their issues back to 1960, large detailed scans along with a full write up, amount printed, dates, assorted facts and all that stuff.
A bit south of Vienna, the Tunisian government has a French-Arabic site for their postal agency and they have a gallery of their issues, too. This one goes back to 1888, though I don't think all are still available for sale, but as a collector, I appreciate the non-commercial aspects of the site.
http://www.pttnet.gov.tn/stamps/
And while you're in North Africa stop in at the Moroccan Post.
http://www.baridalmaghrib.net.ma/
9
[Cyber Dreams]
Can philatelists catch up with genealogists on the WWW? Fanmily historians collect people-facts and have exploited the Net to full advantage with volunteer organizing efforts to share information with millions over the Net. One genealogy club begat Rootsweb, which is approaching something like a virtual archive hub of vast proportions.
Another group started GenWeb with the mission of having one web site for each county in the entire United States, hosted by a genealogist familiar with that county's families and history. Now the US GenWeb Project has gone global, and the effect of these and a few other sites has been phenomenal.
I've been involved in family trees since before DOS was born, and now I get more data, help and email in one day than I used to get in six months.
But can stamp collectors use the web to help it grow? Can a "StampWeb Project" draw a map for all collectors, new and old, from all corners of the globe, to help them find and appreciate the richness and diversity of this hobby?
One Net effort is "The Encyclopaedia of Danish Postal History" by the Society of Danish Postal History, who are using the web to identify material and recruit writers for their undertaking. Plans seem to indicate a CD-ROM for piles of illustrations and tables.
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/3906/bog_en.htm
Another modern database Net effort is the "Universal Catalog Number System." The Philatelic Computing Study Group (PCSG) has a committee and a site for this project with the intent to construct free public domain stamp catalog databases for all countries.
http://www.loop.com/~raygk/ucnsc.htm
The UCNS is the latest pro bono volunteer effort and follows in the footsteps of several others, like "The Internet Stamp Data Base Project."
http://www.idt.unit.no/~bjornmu/stamp.html
"Build it and they will come" convinced a man to build his "Field of Dreams," and it'd be good for the hobby to click on "US Airmail" and see the stamps, postal history and collections unfold before them to enjoy. Well, I know I can dream, but the genealogists are already playing on their field.
10
["It Don't Mean a Thing, If It ... "]
Your important information may one day be guarded by a password linked to your individual typing rhythym, currently being tested. A devious hacker might know that key phrase, but could she duplicate your touch on the keys? After all, how would she know you typed to the melody of "Around The World in 80 Days?"
END
