My Mother Turned Me Into a Stamp Collector

“Every stamp, no matter how insignificant it may appear, is of some value and should be saved.” That’s a quote from one of my mother’s stamp albums, which holds pages of stamps from the 19th century to the 1980s. Contrast this with the response I’ve got from several local dealers and clubs, who’ve collectively told me stamps from the late 20th and early 21st centuries have no worth beyond face value. They’ve advised me to just use them for postage.

My childhood memories include how my mother took care of her stamp collection, buying every new issue, tearing and soaking any odd or foreign stamps off envelopes and carefully using little gummed paper stamp hinges to attach the stamps to the album pages.

That ended, though, somewhere in her years of getting a master’s degree and a full-time job and divorcing my father, and she only indulged her collecting habit half-way after that. She kept saving sheets of stamps, and buying guides and albums from direct-mail marketers, but she never again took up organizing and preserving her collection. Her stamp albums, along with hundreds of loose stamps, got stashed in a little Danish-modern entryway table that contains a cabinet measuring about 16 inches cubed. By the time she died, hundreds more loose stamps were all over the house, in jars, boxes, drawers and simply piled on any available surface.

So my mother’s stamp collection is now mine, and there’s at least one upside — I haven’t had to purchase any new stamps for months. I’ve recently noticed, though, many of the stamps from the 1970s and 1980s could be put into the albums, so maybe I should do that.

I’ve thinned some of the collection by donating a few envelopes full of stamps to the ARIE Foundation, a veterans’ group that encourages stamp collecting. If you have any stamps or stamp-collecting paraphernalia you’d like to donate, their address is: P.O. Box 64, Old Bethpage, NY 11804. Their website is www. ariefoundation.com.

Some local stamp clubs have offered to evaluate my collection and suggest a proper disposition, but the collection is too disorganized to show anybody yet. I don’t know how many hours, days, months or years I’d need to put the collection in order, and by that time, I’d be calling myself a stamp collector, too.