I bought this Stamp Album in Brighton
several years ago, and the book dealer was surprised by my delight, apologising
that there there were so few 'desireable' picture stamps with Brazilian
Footballers, Liberian Orchids or Old Master Paintings from the Canary
Islands. This album represented more clearly than my words ever could,
the experience of becoming a Junior Philatelist, e.g.
• my huge ambition and a certain paucity of
means -
• my carefully formulated plans for classification and
their immediate thwarting
• how far I fell short from the ideal of the Purist in
pursuit of Prime Condition
• an irritation at the overwhelming choice of Heads of
State as the main pictorial feature.
Here I sat aged ten with clouded magnification lens made
from the poorest plastic, carefully assembling the Collector's Kit under
the Anglepoise.
Firstly there was a fat packet of those semi-transparent
paper stamp hinges with inadequate powers of adhesion and a curious
taste. Second into the light was a pair of tweezers with rubber
coated handles. I can't have used them at all, as I mounted the stamps
at a terrific speed, pressing them down with a greasy thumb. I had a
red circular plastic tank with a small sponge to wet the mounts but it
was diverted to another use almost immediately.
When I saw the SPECIAL AGENT album I was surprised by
the incongruity of the link between the Postage Stamp (Philately is so
sedate and pointless) with the
dynamic life of the Agent. The Agent was clearly desperate to leave
Rhyl, so oblivious was he to fellow Mortorists many of whom must also
have been philatelists. The rationale "How
to Start a Stamp Collection" had
a pleasing ring to it. Certain album pages had closely packed examples
in anticipation of getting thousands more. Other pages were blank (Abyssinia)
and unlikely to bear a single example. Stamps were slapped down with
little regard to the rows of dots which tried to impose
some order on the page.
The album reminded me that as a paid up
member of the Stanley Gibbon Stamp Club,I receiving a wallet of gaudy
stickers on approval every month, I found that I much preferred job lots
of miscellaneous foreign stamps to be found in Charity Shops where bulk
was achieved by the inclusion of mass collection of examples
from Finland, Australia and Germany. In engraved style they were dense
and given to spiralling energy within their tiny fields. Sometimes the
designer had tried to compress a vast plain or teeming city into a space
no bigger than a ... postage stamp.
Even more delicious were the swathes of black parallel
lines and illegible letters loaded onto the stamp's surface by the franking
machine, givng Britannia a Groucho Marx moustache, and obliterating
several off-shore islands at a stroke. The act of removing the stamps
from the envelopes very often damaged them beyond repair. These I loved.
I didn't have worry about value.
Each of the examples scanned above has its own characteristic
feature, but I draw your attention to the 25 cent Ceylonese stamp with
the stolid feature of George the Sixth appearing through the Palm
Fronds in close association with the Temple of the Tooth.
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