Quotes About Philately

Philately is normally a boys' hobby but for some reason it was in vogue at my junior school. Between the ages of eight and ten I collected avidly. I'd pore over my Stanley Gibbons book, obsessively checking my collection's value. I always hoped I'd stumble across a really valuable one, a Penny Black or an Inverted Jenny, but it wasn't to be.

regummed. A regummed stamp is one which has lost its original gum somewhere along the way, only to have it replaced with new gum. When the equivalent is performed on, say, a Rembrandt oil painting, we call it restoration; when such restoration is performed on a postage stamp, we're more apt to regard it as a crime against nature, and a clear-cut example of philatelic fraud.

Wait a minute. Can a general worldwide collector care more about some countries than others? Is there a Most-Favored Nation clause in his contract with philately? Ah. Wouldn't you know it? Now I've got a topic for next month's column. . .

The accumulator, with his acquisitions stuffed into boxes in no apparent order, is every bit as acceptable a philatelist as the collector trying slowly and painstakingly to fill, with flawlessly centered, post office-fresh examples, all the spaces in a single hingeless album. We're all in this together, and I figure whatever system we devise for ourselves is just fine.

Now I can't say I approve of counterfeit stamps. But it's hard for me to work up a lot of indignation at a forger who's been dead for the better part of a century. I wouldn't want to buy a fake sold as a genuine stamp, or an official reprint under the illusion that it's an original, but in certain cases and at the right price any of these oddities might find a welcome in my collection. They all make the philatelic universe even more interesting.

Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a corner?" "I don't know, Max." "A postage stamp.

It would be hard to conceive of any activity more useless than stamp collecting.

He glanced about him to make sure we weren't overheard, leaned forward, and whispered, 'He collects stamps.' The family looked bewildered. 'You mean he's a philatelist?' said Larry at length. 'No, no, Master Larrys,' said Spiro. 'He's not one of them. He's a married man and he's gots two childrens.

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area.

My dad was a keen philatelist and, when he died, he left me an album he'd curated over some 40 years. He'd handpicked every item, saying each one reminded him of me. I opened it to discover the pages were full of beige stamps bearing the image of George V. Take from that what you will.

I'm mainly a philatelist, though I know a lot about Tiffany

philatelist

Izydor couldn't care less about either the Party or going to church. Now he needed time for thinking, remembering Ruta, for reading, for learning German, for writing letters, collecting stamps, staring at his skylight, and gradually, idly sensing the order of the universe.