Stamps for Me

“So stamp collecting. It’s a vice, but most pleasant.”

By Henry Bellamann
Editor’s Note: HENRY BELLAMANN was born in Missouri sixty years ago, and by the time he had reached the University of Denver it was clear that he was talented both in music and in literature. He has been a pianist and a lecturer on modern French music, and Dean of the Curtis Institute of Music. He is the author of such entertaining novels as The Richest Woman in Town and Kings Row. He has published two volumes of verse. But for sheer fun he collects stamps—and likes to talk about them.
1

ONCE I knew a cat who liked to lie in the sun and lick her stomach. She did it with an air of dreamy absorption. Léonie, the elderly French maid, Calvinist to the bone, sprinkled mustard on the poor feline to stop the practice. To her horrified mistress she explained: “It’s a vice, Madame. You can see for yourself how much she enjoys it!”

So stamp collecting. It’s a vice, but most pleasant.

All pleasures in this world have their corollary inhibitions. The worst tribulations afflicting my own hobby are my ancestors. When I sit down at my table and spread out all the useless and delightful and expensive paraphernalia, those ancients gather about like a cloud.

“What are you doing?”

“Why are you doing it ? ”

“Don’t you know that’s wasting time and money ? ”

“You should be improving your mind. You should be writing. You should be — ”

And to one another they say: “You can see for yourself how much he is enjoying it! ”

But there is a word of exorcism for all of this. I say: “It’s fun — I like it.”

There is a temptation to be weak and to mumble something about learning geography, or making an investment to send a deserving nephew through college, or relaxing from the tension of modern life. But that doesn’t fool them. They were teachers, and preachers, and farmers. They know I’m not learning geography, nor investing, and that I’m not in need of relaxation. I know a lot about the stamps of the Barbados, but I don’t know or care where the Barbados are. I have spent money on stamps and have hoarded them, and let my nephew join the Marines. Also I have worked much harder at stamps than at my profession.

Then why?

The answer is: fun. It’s playing hooky; it’s being a miser and gloating in the night; it’s grabbing and owning and holding something I know my neighbor covets — his envy is balm to the spirit; it’s being extravagant; and admittedly it’s escape. It is escape to a region where one satisfies the basic instincts of quest and discovery, of acquisition, arrangement, and the creation of form.

Ask a psychiatrist.

All Edens have serpents in them. The lovely private Eden of stamp collecting swarms with them. They are philatelists, dealers, the magnificent collectors’ clubs, and the stamp magazines. It is best to pour wax in your ears and refuse to listen to them. They will make a plating expert of you, turn you into a philatelist, or seduce you into the accumulation of serial numbers and position blocks.

The whole problem is how to collect stamps and not become a philatelist. The solution — be as a little child.

Look at the small boy and observe his collection. What is it he wants? First of all he wants gobs of stamps — any kind, so long as there are many of them. It is the first step to joy. It is like the naturalist who finds himself before a mass of unidentified and unclassified material. (All evidence of the present world to the contrary, one of man’s basic desires is the creation of order out of disorder.)

2

Some of what I have said belongs to the already long ago. There is a war now. One forgoes much. But perhaps more than ever before, we need the sanctuary, the brief forgetfulness afforded by a few moments with a loved collection. We can and do come out from those moments refreshed and abler to meet tomorrow.

But gone are the times when we can permit ourselves to saunter up Fifth Avenue with false nonchalance, ecstatically conscious of that fine pair of Saxony, number one, safe in our breast pocket. No, we live on humbler fare. Some of us turn again to neglected boxes containing the remains of juvenilia. The real fun, if you are not a philatelist looking for plate cracks, is in search and research. The garden varieties offer just that — variety. And in variety is the happiest of hunting grounds. You, doubtless, would hate my stamps as I would scorn yours. Meat and poison are relative terms. But in all cases, snub the advice of the money-changers. Be your own man. Collect what you fancy, and shower your affection upon it. It will reward you.

I have, not a collection, but collections. A really fine array of old European states, a beautiful Austria, a nearly complete Hungary, an excellent Russia. But there is one collection I really love — as one does the plain child, or the runt of the litter. It is a collection of German Inflations. They are the kind of stamps which define the definition “junk.” I have thousands of mint sheets, nearly as worthless as certain stocks in my safety box. But they are an endless study. They illustrate the terrible story of Germany’s economic tailspin — higher and higher figures, on and on to fifty billion marks per stamp. Fifty billion marks, the regular letter rate in November, 1923!

Germany could not check the inflation; but the officials could, with characteristic efficiency, keep track of what they were printing. Even now it is possible to trace the history of each sheet back to the printing house, to the very printing press, and to the man who placed the paper on the rolls.

Perhaps this is not the place to hint at the deadly implications. The Inflation series are merely stamps, printed postal paper, costing less than anything else in the stamp world. There are societies, or were, and periodicals devoted to the study of these poor stamps. German philatelists, with thick glasses, did a scientific job on them. (There are no political aspects now to these obsolete and discredited stamps. If you can find them and buy them, the few cents they cost will not aid anyone — not even the dealer who has given years of wastepaper space to them.) For a collector with only carfare kind of money to spend on a pleasurable collecting adventure, here is one of the richest fields. (Dealers won’t agree. There is, in their own self-accusing phrase, “no percentage” in them.)

And there are issues of our own Americans — recent issues. There are varieties in them. You can build a collection out of anything — sometimes at no cost other than time.

I should like to lay especial emphasis on this.

Of course, if you are one of those collectors who speak of the expansion of your collection as “building a property,” then I have no word for you. You could be the same man who puts a price on his children. I am speaking rather to the collector who loves his collection and rejoices in the technical ingenuities of the collector-elect.

Find ways of exploring the stamps you have. Rearrange them in new categories. Expose new phases of postal history or political change. Investigate the stamps themselves — paper, gum, cancellations, shades. Try to find a cover (complete envelope with stamp and postmark) posted in your home town on the day of your birth! You’ll be surprised where that will take you.

I forgot to mention the peril which is an ever present threat to the collector, whether he accumulates Adam mantels, Waterford glass, or match folders. The comic strips call her “the wife.” But a collector would be only half a collector without her. She is the element of danger, the foe who tests your strategy.

Does she say: “Dear, you need a new suit. That one is really too shiny”?

Don’t you say: “No, no! This will do for a long time. Got to cut down these days”?

She doesn’t know, but you do, that you’ve already spent that new suit, and that the little guilty envelope is thrust with careful carelessness, like Roe’s purloined letter, into the confusion of the bottom drawer.

But there is a device. I will reveal it. It won’t work in all cases because women are seldom good collectors, but sometimes — It is simply the stratagem of partners in crime. Lead her into collecting. Be guileful. Present her with something that she has casually admired.

I know a man who collects stamps in all domestic safety, wastes time with impunity, and exhibits his interests with impudence. He gave his wife a handful of British penny reds with an offhand remark that he wondered if she could assort them according to plate and position. Later, after the poison worked, he gave her a hundred thousand penny reds (cost thirty-five dollars), and a magnifying glass all her own, and a set of plate books. It was like giving a restless child a lifetime lollipop. It will take her twenty years to reconstruct the one hundred fifty plates of what she calls “the Queen of all stamps.” Meanwhile — peace, immunity, fellowship, and the pretty domestic spectacle of two graying heads bent together under the evening lamp.

3

The stress of the day in which we are living is unbelievably great. We have need of releases through simple pleasures.

Collecting — no matter what — is a many-faceted and highly versatile answer to some surprisingly basic needs. We do not have to be psychiatrists to know how elemental these needs are, and how adequate the therapeutics of elementary pastimes. President Roosevelt’s stamps, King Gustav’s embroidery! Wicked men do not have hobbies, I am told, and I can believe it.

The fields of collecting are as wide as the world, and even the one field of stamps covers the globe. There are so many aspects of stamp collecting, so many ways and methods not suggested to the novice by commercial interests. The how — the many kinds of how — are another story. The reason for and the end result of are my concern here.

Interest. As we grow older our interests are likely to narrow and to atrophy. Mental sclerosis, no less. The difficulty of maintaining interest, just interest, increases. Our minds become like trampled lawns. After a while what was young and shooting grass lies limp and bedraggled. The only resurrective agent is interest — the kind of interest that is a rest and a restorative. We can be weighed to the ground with so-called interests which are responsibilities. I don’t mean those things. I am talking about happy, foolish things.

You’ll be a better man for that use of time. Since we are warned just now to use ourselves all-out for defense, and since we are at the same time such fiends for efficiency, we may allow ourselves to remember that we can use ourselves with efficiency only if we punctuate our efforts with appropriate and rewarding pause.

Escape? Well, what’s wrong with escape if you escape at the right time and to the right place? You may live to fight another day.

I say escape, rightly understood, legitimately used, is one factor of living which has enabled us to get here after a troublesome trek through the ages. The kind of escape afforded by a harmless hobby is a rest, a tonic, a stimulus. Ride the blessed thing. Like all good hobbies, it isn’t going anywhere, but when you dismount you’ll be at home. Collect your stamps in peace and glee. And if you are so constituted that your content is the greater for a soupçon of guilt — you can see for yourself how much you are enjoying it!