Stamped out in the internet age
Igot rid of my stamp collection the other day. It was no great loss from a monetary standpoint. The emotional loss, though, was enormous.
There was a time when my collection might have fetched a good amount, because there was a time when people cared about stamps. They used them to mail bills, letters and postcards, and in the process paid attention to what was on them. You didn’t have to be a collector to value the beautiful, quirky and rare.
Today, many if not most bills are paid online. Letters are rarely written and sent; email suffices. Stamps are still used occasionally, if rarely saved or savoured. And most of what passes for stamps are generic images printed on demand at a postal kiosk. Stamps were, and sometimes still are, things of beauty and history, links to distant places that spawned a global hobby known as philately, or, simply, stamp collecting. Putting a bright spotlight on the hobby was none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the philatelist in chief, often shown in official White House photographs with a magnifying glass, viewing his collection.
Before hours wasted on video games and other ephemeral pleasures, the hobby transfixed and transported youngsters. Stamps were the adhesive coins of the realm, a way to learn geography, history and politics. Every high school had its stamp club. I never joined one, but I did earn the stamp collecting merit badge in Boy Scouts (thankfully, the badge still exists), and I amassed a sizable collection from various sources.
I received foreign stamps from one of my dad’s well-travelled co-workers. On my own, I pursued new domestic issues, sending a stamped self-addressed envelope to post offices of issue. The envelope would come back with the new stamp and the dated postmark with the special “First Day of Issue” cancellation. For each new “commemorative” stamp, I acquired a “plate block” of four stamps ripped from the corner of a sheet of stamps, printed on the first day. Even the United Nations issued stamps, which could be sent only from the UN headquarters in Manhattan, and I collected them, too. So off I went, with my collection, first to Maryland Stamps and Coins, open for 42 years and among the dwindling number of businesses still serving a dying hobby.
There I learned the sad truth: There is no longer a market for the collection I once so greatly valued. Collectors are passing on at an alarming rate; the average collector, I was told, is 65 to 70 years old. There was a time when the Inverted Jenny stamp was a household name; though examples continue to fetch seven figures at auction, how many people have even heard of it? Judy Johnson, the membership manager of the American Philatelic Society, the world’s largest nonprofit organisation for stamp collectors, confirmed all of this. The society has 28,953 members today, compared with 56,532 two decades ago - a 50 percent drop in 20 years, and prospects are not good.
No commercial use
“Trying to bring in the younger 30-to-50-year-old crowd is really difficult,” she said. The continuing decline is because of “things you can’t control, illness and death.”
The Maryland stamp dealer had no commercial use for my collection. But, he said, I could donate them to Stamps for the Wounded, a veterans organisation. It was, the brochure he handed me stated, “Philately’s Volunteer Service Committee.” I called Bruce Unkel, who helps organise donations. He invited me to bring my collection to a storage facility in Falls Church, Virginia, where, every Saturday for four hours, volunteers sort and prepare the donations for shipment to Veterans Affairs hospitals and residences across the country.
Arriving at the facility, I walked through deserted hallways to reach the locker where three men, Bruce, 76, Larry, 74, and Drew (“just old,” he told me), sat and sorted. On average, they get one collection a week. It cost $30 (Dh110) to ship a box, and they ship about eight a month, mostly to veterans of Vietnam and Korea. In addition to stamps, they accept cash, to cover the cost of the storage rental and, well, postage. All three men still collect, but Bruce won’t touch anything “worldwide” issued after 1970 because there is just too much of it, and every two years you must buy a new stamp album to accommodate new additions. It is all just too much, even for the die-hards. Eugene L. Meyer is a journalist and author.