Wendy Williams

When I was first coming into organized philately some 40 years ago there was a charming older woman named Wendy Williams. Wendy was about sixty then, worked in one the records offices in Philadelphia, had been married, was now divorced and had no children. Whatever club meeting you went to in the Philadelphia area in those days you were sure to see Wendy. On Mondays, she was at the Frankfurt club, on Tuesdays in Springfield and on and on. An avid stamp collector could have coffee with Wendy pretty much every day of the week. And she was not an idle hanger on. I believe at her hay day in 1975, she was, at the same time, Secretary treasurer of three clubs and vice President of two more. She ran the hospitality committees of almost all of the clubs she belonged to, was membership chair of several others and was auctioneer at several more. Once when the plumbing got stuffed up at one club... but I exaggerate. Everyone loved Wendy. She was stamp mom to us younger collectors and stamp wife to her contemporaries, always friendly, caring and kind. After knowing her for many years she got sick, it was quick, and she passed away. Her funeral was a philatelic event and as I stood watching her casket pass I turned to probably her best stamp friend and said "Funny,  I knew Wendy for many years but I don' t think she ever told me what she collected." "Oh Wendy never collected stamps" was the answer "She collected friends".

A Secret About Stamp Collectors

I have spent a life time around stamp collectors. My father and grandfather were both stamp collectors, and I got my first album at the age of six. I have belonged to over ten clubs and have been a professional philatelist for over forty years. There is a little known secret about stamp collectors that for the most part they don't want you to know and that they hide with all their might, and the secret is this: stamp collectors are usually kind and gentle people. Sure there are some bears in hobby and people who take advantage of others and who are mean spirited, unkind or who expect something for nothing. Collectors are not perfect but they are generally pretty nice guys. I write and talk to scores each week and they are eager to talk about what they are doing and how they collect. And they have other interests outside the hobby and love their families and are really very nice regular people. Introspective, cerebral, often shy but usually very nice. It is writing and talking to collectors that has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my professional life.

Wonderful Albums-Cheap Price

There is an unfortunate hobby arc that goes like this. A wealthy person decides that he wishes to be an enthusiast, buys an enormous amount of gear, and loses interest before he has gotten any of the real enjoyment out of his new whim. This is the fly fisher who has all the latest Orvis gear or the guy with the 120" projector screen in a private home. In philately, this shows itself in the new collector who buys a large set of very beautiful and expensive matched hingeless specialty albums, fills them with thousands of the mostly more basic stamps and loses interest in our hobby before all the real fun begins. For the great pleasure of philately is the chase, searching for difficult to find material and slowly creating a fine collection from which you learn and derive joy. But these ephemeral collectors provide a benefit for other collectors in the sense that plankton provides a benefit for whales. They create a constant stream of fine, barely used specialty album collections that come on the market and which collectors who are entering philately or expanding their scope within the hobby can purchase, often for little more than the value of the stamps that are in them. Thousands of dollars worth of albums are sold in this way for a fraction of their original retail price. We have such a group in our current Buy It Now sale. Do you like Russia (2457) or France (1459) or Germany (1558) or the United States (733)?

Specialty Research

One of the greatest difficulties in our hobby is passing specialized information from one generation to the next. Philatelic books are often indexed and catalogs exist of book titles, but the vast majority of philatelic writing is (and was) for periodicals, and no adequate philatelic periodical index exists. During the later years of the Nineteenth Century, there were scores of monthly philatelic journals that printed scholarly and semi-learned articles about stamps, and nearly all of this material is lost to us now. We still have access to these periodicals in our better philatelic libraries such as the American Philatelic Research Library, but only readers who have the time and geographic access to thumb through these journals can use them. And these journals and articles are nearly useless to students who want to know what was written about their subject in the past. Years ago I used to buy cartons of hundred year old stamp magazines and page through them in my spare time. Such cartons of hundred year old literature are surprisingly cheap, when you can find them. What amazed me was how often different generations and different continents repeated the same research and study on their stamps and then presented the research as new because they had no way of knowing what had been done before. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of problem that it used to be because fewer collectors are researching their stamps and writing up their collections.

The Great Schism

Historians mark two types of dates in history. There are dates like 1066, the Norman Conquest of Britain, which are known at the time to the players involved to be significant dates in which vast changes have occurred. And there are dates such as 1054, which marks the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern church of Constantinople. The two churches had been feuding for years and 1054 marked a dividing point that is largely a  historian's construct. As the schism was a process, the date for it could have been fixed either a century or two before or after. Had any real attempts at reconciliation occurred, 1054 would be meaningless to us now. We have such different types of dates in philately. 1840 is our Genesis, for really there is no philately without stamps and 1840 marks the date of the first postal issue. But I think 1990 will come to be known as a seminal date in US philately, perhaps the Great Philatelic Schism. This is the date that the USPS began issuing sheets of 20 of US commemoratives. At the time the change seemed minor. Stamps that were previously issued in sheets of 50 were now issued in sheets of 20. But the effect was profound. It eliminated plate blocks collecting, where a full sheet had to be bought and the plate block retained and the rest of the sheet used as postage. Collectors just started saving the full sheets of 20. And because collectors began saving the full commemorative sheets the amount that collectors had to spend on their US new issues increased five fold, so they had less to spend on other stamps for their collections and prices grew soft.  Combine this with far higher nominal values of the stamps over the years and it is clear that a higher and higher proportion of US philatelic money is tied up in postage type material. And this material has decreased in value for the holders of it-from full face value when it is purchased at the Post Office to 60% when it is sold. So 1990 is the year that philatelic historians will look back and date as the time of the final disconnect between traditional philately and New Issue collecting-of the bad deal that made it harder for unsophisticated collectors to make their hobby financially worthwhile.

Linear Isolation

Philately is the result of one of the great social innovations in the history of communications- cheap and rapid postal messaging. Before 1500, the only communication that was available for most people was direct conversation. You visited distant family and friends yourself or received word from them from the people who had seen them. Letters for anything other than the most momentous events became more and more common after 1500 and by the advent of cheap postage (furthered by stamps in 1840) the post had made family communications very pervasive. Many lithographic pictures of the time exist of families reading together the mail that had come from distant relatives and drafting their collective responses. Today, with letter writing virtually nonexistent people have turned to email and cell phones for their communication. But even though these new technologies allow us to be in contact easier and even more often than before, they create only linear communication. Years ago when my wife and I were first married I would often answer the phone when her parents called. They lived far away and simple politeness meant that I spoke to them for several minutes before passing them over to my wife. They and I developed a relationship from this that slowly grew as we saw more of each other and talked more but had it's origins in the non linear nature of communication of the time like letters and land phones. Today, cell phone calls and emails go only to one recipient and though we all talk to our kids with greater frequency than our parents talked to us, we talk only to them and have less of a relationship with the other people in their lives. Communication which started out as individuals talking to one another and expanded to a more group dynamic through the early years of the post (which philately honors) has now returned to the more linear lines of communication of the earlier era. The sense of community which stamps helped created was a nicer, richer part of life which we are sadly giving up.

Quality and Handling

If you ask them, stamp collectors and dealers tell you that they never damage stamps when they handle them. They always use tongs correctly, hinge and mount their stamps carefully so that the stamps never stick or are thinned, and never crease a corner or damage a perforation. But the evidence presents a very different picture. The dollar values of the 1893 Columbian issue (Scott #241-245) were, from the very first, an issue that went almost entirely into philatelic hands. The highest denomination issue ever created by the United States Post Office before these stamps were issued was a 90c value and here were five different dollar issues with a total of $15 face value that were issued together. Fifteen dollars in 1893 was a weeks wages for a skilled laborer and was far in excess of any normal postal fee so it is clear that the stamps were commemoratives for collectors and were bought mostly by collectors and dealers. So if philatelists were so careful in their handling of stamps you would expect a large undamaged pool of dollar value Columbians to be available for collectors today. After all, damaging your stamps significantly reduces their value and is something no collector willingly does. Yet look at the number of truly undamaged dollar value Columbians. It is less than 5% of the number that are offered for sale. Collectors have over the years inadvertently damaged 19 out of 20 of these stamps. Collectors are careful, but stamps are fragile and, despite our best efforts, most of the wear and tear to our precious stamps we cause ourselves.