Ick + Philately

It's so humid that I've worked up a sweat while fiddling with my stamp collection. Which is going swimmingly, btw, and which is also how I feel about sitting in this humidity. Ha!

I need more stock sheets, though; I don't use the little gummy flaps to hinge 'em into books, I use the ones with rows of plastic you snug them into. I've got tons of stamps sorted into the cute little glassine envelopes, with nowhere to go.

I just got in a bunch of stamps for really cheap (like $8) recently, which were awesome, because they came from a book gotten at an estate sale. Inheriting someone else's stamps is fun, and they might have some rarer ones. Online (ebay and stampwants are the biggest sites, I think) you can get all kinds of stuff, but most often the auctions/sales are for individual stamps or series, with their catalog numbers listed, etc. I like getting a mass of stamps and discovering different stuff. The other stamp purchase I made recently is for 1000 worldwide (this usually means no American or English stamps), and a pack of 25 stamps from Malawi and 50 from Mexico. I mostly got those because they were from the same vendor and were dirt cheap/postage-free. But I'm collecting Malawian stamps in particular, for nostalgic purposes: I spent a semester at Chancellor College in Malawi my junior year at Colby College.

Otherwise I've got stuff from just about every country around, including from some that aren't around anymore. I've got a ton of American and Russian stamps, though, the former out of an interest in my country's history, and the latter because they're kewl. Actually, I can list off a bunch of countries w/bitchin' stamp designs, so I'm still just grabbing any old stamps in general, although this (with the above exception) is being curtailed a fair bit for lack of funds.

I almost made it to an estate sale recently where the guy told me there'd be stamps, but it was too far away. Eh! I'll keep hunting. Estate sales are a gas, btw, and if you've never been to one, you should check it out. People go fucking nuts.

I see dead people's stamps

In the last three days I've been much the philately geek. Bidding tiny amounts for interesting stuff on eBay (I'm a total cheapskate, which is necessary because of my barren bank account), and getting a couple fun things in the mail. One package I got was an old, unopened bag of "mission stamps." Also called "charity stamps," I learned that these are bunches of stamps that are gathered by and/or for religious groups (hence the term mission) which are then sold to stamp addicts for charity. How odd... I can't imagine it turning much of a profit. But, the benefit to a stamp collector is that these are grab bags which are supposedly unsorted and unpicked by anyone, meaning you might get some rare stuff amongst the many commons. But at this point I'm not really capable of telling one from the other, since my DVD stamp guide hasn't arrived in the mail yet. This company Scott has a corner on the stamps market, and they release new catalogs every year, which feature not only a price guide for the stamps, but pictures of every fucking stamp ever. They're six massive phone book sized tomes per year, costing like $300. Crazy. The DVD I found was substantially cheaper.

But I've figured that the best way to get more interesting, older stamps would be to grab other people's collections... those of dead people. I've been looking for a while to see if any estate sales were in the area (yard sales are pretty rare in the winter), and last week I found one. It was on Friday and my friend Dave (also a hunter of bargains) got there about quarter to nine in the morning. It was a riot. People started lining up in the cold (well, we didn't, but most did) waiting for the doors to open, and at exactly 9 AM, in rushed about two dozen people, in the space of a minute. When we got in, it was like vultures ripping away at the previous owner's carcass! I immediately looked at the table of ephemera (my word of the week, meaning anything that's printed that isn't a book or magazine, basically), but only found a couple of old envelopes with stamps on them. In the end, I bought those and a small stack of neat looking (unused) envelopes for $2, and Dave got a big pot for $1. I'm sure we could have found this or that if we searched through everything, but meh! Screw it. But now I'm keeping my eye out for similar sales.

I should also give out a general plea here... if you get stamps from other countries occasionally, feel free to save and send 'em to me! I'm still trying to figure out what kind I really want to collect. For now I'm just getting a general mass of the things together (I should really get a stamp book), but eventually I'll pick a couple things in particular. I think I'd like to get a lot of French stamps (they actually put art reproductions on their stamps), and if there are many, stamps depicting mythological material, and legends, folklore, etc.

And to combine the two... well, these aren't French stamps, but it's a French painter, and his paintings have made it onto some commemorative stamps, which I've now ordered. It's my all-time favorite artist, William-Adolphe Bouguereau!