joelperry.com

In telling you my story, I will attempt to make it as interesting as possible, and I promise not to make you sit with me for the twelve or so hours it would likely take for me to show you my entire collection; that could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Instead I will tell you my story, and you will discover the amazing power of philately and how it is possible for a childhood hobby to become a life altering experience that could not be traded for all the gold in the world. It taught me patience in a time when I needed it most; I developed a keen sense of detail and manual dexterity that has been paralleled throughout my entire life even till today; and lastly it triggered a lifelong interest in strange lands and linguistics that has not been abated to this very day. Here is my story.

When I was ten years old on a lazy summer day, my mother, brother, and I were visiting with her friends. This, as I recall, was generally quite boring; my brother and I had our minds on everything except for sitting in a house with a bunch of adults. But on this one particular day, one of my mother’s friends, a lady from Malta, for reasons unbeknownst to me, decided to give us a postage stamp from her native land. Now prior to this point, I cannot recall even so much as thinking about the idea of a postage stamp any more than it being a sticky picture with a numeric denomination that people lick and affix to their mailed correspondence. But something about this one simple Maltese postage stamp welled up such an inexplicably huge amount of excitement in me, that I find it difficult to describe. My brother and I shared a common comic book, and sports card collection, but the comic books were interesting to me only to the extent that I enjoyed reading them, and the sports cards were only interesting to the extent that they came with chewing gum. It seemed to me, at this moment in time, that there was nothing more interesting under the sun than this one lonely Maltese postage stamp. In fact, it kept my attention for days in the most extreme of ways. I would daydream that maybe this stamp was worth a million dollars, and immediately proceeded to think up ways to protect it, putting it in this envelope, then that piece of saran wrap, and finally ending with it shielded in the glassine housing once inhabited by a baseball card. Within days, my focus left that Maltese stamp only to be magnetically diverted to the letter holder on the kitchen wall, where our parents kept all of their correspondence. I removed every single stamp I could find from those envelopes, and organized them by type, size, shape, color, and continued reorganizing them, until their organization made sense to me. I was a veritable “stampivore” with a boundless appetite. After plundering the letter holder for all it was worth, I found myself standing beside my parents as they dug through all of their old correspondence in the storage space, in search of new stamps to satiate my appetite. It consisted mostly of love letters my parents wrote to each other when my father was in the navy, interesting in and of itself to my ten year old mind, and airmail stamps from the sixties. Two significant developments happened within weeks of the Maltese acquisition that solidified my membership in the world of philately. Firstly, I somehow learned how to soak stamps off of an envelope. I cannot exactly recall how I learned this skill; I must have read about the technique somewhere. I had my own system however, which basically started with cleaning all the porcelain surfaces in the bathroom, mainly the sink, the toilet lid, and the edge of the bathtub. Now this was surely a pleasant sight to my family, except for the fact that postage stamps drying in all of these places, and a sink full of soaking stamps, make it difficult to use these facilities for the purpose to which they were intended. The second thing I did was talked my brother into a special trade that went something like this: he could have all of the comic books, and sports cards, if I could have the stamps, and for the rest of our lives, if I were ever to have a comic book, I would give it to him, and vice versa. Even to this day, as far as I know, that treaty has never been broken; and that is how I started in the world of stamp collecting.

In medical terms, during my teen years, I would have been described as extremely hyperactive, with attention deficit disorder. While it is quite true that getting me to focus on school work in grade school required a combined total of a few years on restriction, this was far from true when it came to stamp collecting. In fact, I often spent dozens of obsessive hours engulfed in this hobby, organizing stamps, categorizing stamps by country, soaking, drying, observing under magnifying glass, comparing the stamps to documentation, studying watermarks of seemingly identical stamps, mounting in albums hands free with tongs and mounts, and all that is related to the hobby. Bulk boxes of unorganized stamps of the world can be bought for less than a penny per stamp, and so twenty or thirty dollars of my parent’s money went a long way towards keeping me busy. It is the sort of excitement that is one hundred percent internal, and a stamp collector alone in his hobby is the epitome of silent, patient, and detailed work, on the exterior. All you can see is calm, skilled hands, poring over sometimes boundless amounts of material, possibly a desk or floor covered with countless stacks of that which is being organized, and tools of the trade spread out everywhere. The collector has no reason to speak; there is no jumping up and down, and the most you may notice is the occasional grin on the discovery of something truly beautiful or interesting. That occasional calm grin may be reflecting an enormous eruption of mind spinning internal excitement, and the pulse may be beating ferociously; on the other hand, it may be reflecting a swooning sense of internal warmth akin to stumbling upon a delicate and rare flower in a field of weeds; but all you will ever see on the outside are calm hands, someone engrossed in the detail that is philately, and one person constructing and discovering that which is known as a stamp collection. This whole idea shoots a major hole in the theory of hyperactivity and short attention span. While it is true that children and adults often display the traits of inattention and hyperactivity, is it not possible that this behavior could be considered selective based upon interest in the occasion or task at hand? Stamp collecting, for me, was natural. And reflecting upon all of that which I had accomplished was a constant reminder to me of the fact that I not only possessed the ability to focus calmly for extremely long periods of time on one task, but that it was within me to be patient.

Manual dexterity, and an attention to detail go hand in hand with the art that is, being a stamp collector; but one skill does not necessarily precede the other. In my case, the hobby came first, and the dexterity and attention to detail came with time. I never consciously tried to develop an ability to see that which is not obvious on the surface; neither did I purposefully attempt to develop the ability to work with fine instruments in a careful precision that is common to philately. It was just something that came naturally over time. It is the kind of thing that one learns, when one is not forced to learn, but learns through natural interest. The process of stamp collecting can involve many forms; one can buy other collections if they have the means; another may only collect in one area of philately, such as first day of issue envelopes that post offices around the country offer on a subscription basis. But for most children, stamp collecting usually involves taking a completely disorganized pile of stamps, some on envelopes and some not, and after soaking, grading, organizing by country, organizing by year, or maybe by topic, they add them to a stamp album. Many stamps, from many countries, including early American stamps, are virtually identical except for a marking, or attribute, that cannot be seen without magnification. Some stamps are virtually identical, except for a watermark that can only be seen by soaking the stamp in watermark fluid, observing this hidden watermark on the back of the stamp, and comparing it to published data on the relevant stamp issues. Stamps collectors assign quality grades to individual stamps, and this grade translates into a relative value for each stamp. Some of the elements that are included in the overall grading of a stamp are the centering of the print, the lack or inclusion of gum, evidence of a prior hinge mount and how badly that hinge affects the stamp, the heaviness of the cancellation on the face, and whether the entire stamp is intact as printed, with no prior restoration. Furthermore, a young stamp collector, when dealing in worldwide stamps, will spend an exorbitant amount of time classifying and organizing individual stamps by their country of origin. At first this is done by comparing the writing or details on the stamp with a book that identifies the writing as being from a certain country. Eventually the collector memorizes these features and immediately knows for example that “CCCP” means U.S.S.R., “Sverige” means Sweden, “Norge” is Norway, “DDR” is East German, while “Deutsche Bundepost” is West German, all the way through every country that ever mailed a letter. The role of details involved in stamp collecting could take up volumes of literature, and the techniques involved in handling them are extensive. Most of these things, I learned through natural interest before the age of thirteen. These skills have become a part of who I am and have unavoidably overlapped into the rest of my life. I can hardly use the bathroom without noticing that the tag on my underwear reads “100% algodon,” “Hecho En Thailandia” and take humorous mental note of the fact that my cotton underwear is made in Thailand for Spanish speaking people. And that our cultures share similar techniques for washing clothes. I am an unavoidable observer of that which is not always obvious; I attribute that, and my dexterous ability, to a lifetime of philately.

My lifelong interest in strange lands and linguistics would have to hail, as inspiration in chief, the study of philately. It is difficult to imagine anyone spending this much time on a hobby of such magnitude, without walking away with additional interests. A postage stamp can tell a wonderful story if the beholder takes the time to observe. First, there is the cancellation which says so much. This stamp may have traveled the entire globe, by ship, air, and land. The date indicates an era or time when this stamp made its amazing journey; the country of origin, and writing on an envelope can tell a story in and of it self. My air mail stamp, cancelled in 1945 with a cachet on the envelope says the following: “First Flight T.W.A.F.A.M.27 – New York To Basra, Iraq”. This reminds me of a time when relations between our countries were much friendlier. While one stamp tells a story, a whole collection of one nation’s stamps tell a deep history. We can see that which our nation has in common with other countries; we can notice extreme differences in our nations. We can observe Fifty years of communist style propaganda and all of its intricacies by studying a collection of Soviet and Chinese postage stamps. We can remember events that occurred in our global history, by studying and researching a large collection of postage stamps. The insights are endless. Recently, I purchased a postcard with no stamp on it. Why was this so interesting? Well, it happened to have a cancellation of 1942 from a military hospital in Illinois, and the soldier wrote ‘free” in place of the stamp and sent it to his mother with his thanks for all her cookies and love. This is the only stamp less envelope in my collection, but it reminds me of a time when our country was in a great struggle, and just as mothers send cookies to their sons at war today, and soldiers love their mothers, so was it back when our grandparents ran the world. When I turned thirteen, I decided I was going to learn how to speak French. By fifteen I was in high school, I was taking Spanish, French, and German at the same time, spent most of my time hanging out with my best friend from Panama, and I dreamed of traveling the world. Foreign languages never left my line of interests, in fact to this day I enjoy thinking on them, speaking them, learning their intricacies, and comparing them to each other. Most of my twenties involved working in sales, and very little foreign travel, but I finally took the opportunity to travel Europe twice over a combined span of three months in my late twenties. I cherished every single minute of it. Sometimes I try to think about why I became so interested in the world, and why languages are so incredibly interesting to me. It all comes back to that wonderful childhood hobby; the hobby that took up thousands of hours of my time; it is the mysterious, and wonderfully rewarding hobby known as philately.

I still enjoy my childhood hobby with the same level of enthusiasm, and it seems that the patience that it requires, and I possess, is a welcome retreat from the hustle and bustle that is the world around us. When I look at my dexterous hands, and when I am faced with anything of detail, I thank my lucky stars that I was given this beautiful gift that is philately. When I see a postage stamp, I see it so much differently than I would have, had I not been involved in collecting them for the better part of my life. I see the world, I see strange languages, and sometimes I understand the meaning of it all. The most wonderful and amazing thing of all you ask? That would be the fact that this whole adventure started with one Maltese postage stamp. ~Joel Perry