12/3/99

Conversations With a Philatelist

Stamps, boring?! Tell someone whose aim in life is acquiring a scrap of paper from Cape Juby.

    "Whatchadoin', Daddy?"
    "Thtmth."
    "Thtmth?"
    "Sorry. I had a stamp hinge on my tongue. I'm doing stamps. Putting my collection in order, rearranging the albums, updating the pages, separating the duplicates."
    "Oh. Looks like you're stickin' stickers."
    "In a way I thuppoth it ith thtickin' thtickerth. Ah, sorry."
    "Ya got any Barbie stickers there? I have lots. And some Power Rangers too."
    "Come to think of it, no. But I just got my first Bophuthatswanan."
    "I'm glad for you, Daddy. Have fun."
    "Hey, where you going?"
    "Don't want to disturb you. And anyway, it looks boring."
    "Whoa there! Stamps, boring? Look at this one here. It's just possible that some little girl your age licked the back of this stamp 80 years ago and put in on a letter from her home in Tegucigalpa and mailed it all the way to her friend in, uh, Godthaab, and then her friend gave it to her cousin visiting from Ryukyu Islands who sold it to a collector from Fujeira and then it was lost for a long time until a Corsican refugee from the war brought it to Canada and eventually gave it to me on his deathbed and I, inspired by 2,000 years of Jewish yearning, made aliya with all my stamps including this one which, someday, you could very well be telling your grandchildren about."
    "Maybe, maybe not."
    "Okay. But it's not impossible, you have to admit. That's the thing about stamps. Each one has a little history all its own."
    "Like my Barbie stickers."
    "Huh?"
    "Like maybe I bought them from Avi in the makolet and he stole them from an Arab who's married to Barbie. It's possible, right Daddy?"
    "Hmm..."

"WHAT COUNTRY is that one from?"
    "Qatar."
    "Catarrh? Funny name for a country. What language do they speak, Phlegmish?"

"THINGS AIN'T what they used to be, that's for sure. You know how much the world has changed? It's gone back to the way it was 60, 80 years ago."
    "I know what you mean. To me the world looks different every day."
    "Back then, you could get new stamps from Russia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania. Germany was one country. Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia issued stamps independently. But when I was a kid, these places were ancient philatelic history. Well, guess what? They're all back in business."
    "Gee, next thing you know, there's gonna be new stamps from Palestine."

"LIKE EVERYTHING else nowadays, stamps are so commercialized. Daffy Duck and Michael Jackson and Sylvester Stallone appear on stamps as if they're proud native sons of Tonga and Burundi and Sharjah."
    "That's terrible."
    "And can you tell me why a place like Tristan da Cunha needs hundreds of thousands of stamps if only 252 people live there?"
    "Awful."
    "Or Pitcairn Islands, with its population of 62. There were almost as many people on the moon, for heaven's sake. And does the moon have mail service?"
    "I don't know, but I'll bet there's no seamail."

"... NEXT IS Greenland ... Grenada ... Guernsey ... Guinea ..."
    "But we've already seen the Guinea pages."
    "That was Ghana."
    "How do you know which is which?"
    "Huh. That's only the half of it. There's Ghana, Guinea, Guyana and Papua-New Guinea. Also Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and French Guinea. But don't confuse French Guinea with French Guiana or British Guiana or Spanish Guinea or Portuguese Guinea."
    "No Israeli Guinea?"
    "No."

"MY BROTHER collects stamps, I'll bet you didn't know that. He's got the biggest known collection from the Mirror World."
    "The Mirror World?"
    "That's right. Countries like Lower Volta. Inner Mongolia. The Isle of Woman."
    "Does he have any from Burpa?"
    "Ha! Good one."
    "Oldlostland, a province in Cantada."
    "Cape of Bad Hope. Progo."
    "Danzag, Gaboff, Outdia."
    "Here in the Middle East, or should I say Outer West: Saudi Jewia and Uwalked. And Isntrael."
    "Ooh, yeah!"
    "Japot and Gerfew."
    "No wonder they lost the war."
    "Here's a tricky twosome: Panapa and Manapa."
    "I give up."
    "One's a canal. The other's the capital of Bahrain."
    "Unpakistan."
    "Hee, hee, hee!"
    "The Feminist States: Trinimom, and Yewomen."
    "Love it!"
    "Spleasure."
    "Togo or Nottogo, that is the question."
    "F-- ... uh, maybe I better not."
    "What?"
    "The mirror country for Virgin Islands."
    "Let's leave that one alone, shall we?"
    "Daddy, I just thought of something. You don't have a brother."
    "Correct. And my sister doesn't collect stamps."
    "Mirror World, right?"
    "Right."

"ARE THERE others like you?"
    "No, I'm the only one. I've checked."
    "The only stamp collector in the whole world?"
    "Oh, that. No, lots of people do this. Some do it for investment purposes, though not me. Others collect stamps as a form of therapy."
    "Therapy? Isn't that something people need when they're, like, sick in the head? Uh, Daddy, are you doing this for therapy?"
    "No, of course not."
    "Then why?"
    "Dunno. I suppose once I got started, I just couldn't stop. I got a few stamps and a little album for my eighth birthday. I thought that every stamp in the world was illustrated in that album, so if I could fill every space on every page I'd have the complete set. I'm a bit obsessive that way. So I kept acquiring more and more stamps, and the album was nearly full. I had a few hundred. That's when I found out the world issues a few hundred new stamps every week, and that's been going on for 130 years. I was really depressed. I lowered my target to trying to get at least one stamp from every country. After 32 years I have 20,000 stamps from 341 different issuing entities, but nothing -- nothing -- from Cape Juby or Allenstein or Transcaucasian Federal Republic, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of new countries have been born, thanks to bloody Gorbachev, and now I don't have --"
    "Daddy, sounds like you need therapy."

"YOU MIGHT as well throw that one away."
    "Why?"
    "Like you told me, you don't keep damaged stamps."
    "So what's wrong with it?"
    "Take a good look. The picture's upside down."