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2d • General discussion
Wise Words about what we do
I love this and thought it worth sharing.
Andrew McGavin runs Universal Philatelic Auctions in the UK (www.upastampauctions.co.uk) and this is his latest email to customers. I'm sharing it with Andrew's permission.
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Perhaps you saw the news recently saying that Denmark is to cease all letter deliveries.
Effectively stopping the issuing of stamps altogether.
Iceland, of course, has already gone down that road. And I suppose, if one is being practical about it, the stock answer is obvious enough:
You can’t stop progress.
Fair enough.
But then again… who's to say it’s progress?
That, I think, is the more interesting question.
Because historical things are rather nice to hold on to, aren’t they?
And stamp collectors, if you ask me, are slightly unusual people (in the best possible sense), because they don’t merely look forwards like everyone else seems compelled to do nowadays.
They look backwards as well. Back to what they knew.
Back to what interested them as teenagers, or young adults.
Some collect all the way through life, for 60 or 70 years, which is extraordinary when you think about it.
Others stop after marriage, children, work, life, (the usual interruptions) and then return to it later, when the world has quietened down a bit and the old interests start to call again.
And what always strikes me is this:
Collectors know things.
A phenomenal number of things.
Odd things. Obscure things. Useful things. Sometimes completely unnecessary things.
The sort of things no one would ever deliberately set out to learn, and yet through stamps they somehow do.
The other day my wife asked me about Somalia.
“Isn’t that Eritrea?” she said.
And I found myself replying, “Well… yes, but not exactly,” because in stamp terms there are issues for Somalia and issues for Eritrea, and once you’ve spent enough years peering at bits of paper from around the world, your brain becomes cluttered with these distinctions whether you intended it or not.
We looked it up afterwards, by the way and, hands up, I may not have had every detail perfectly right, but the point stands.
You learn.
Or take the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I know for a fact it opened in 1932.
Now who on earth would know that, except a nerd like me?
And yet thousands of collectors know such things, because stamps lead you there.
Into history, geography, empire, politics, war, peace, changing borders, vanished colonies, kings, queens, catastrophes, jubilees, and all the rest of it.
You don’t simply acquire a stamp. You acquire the story attached to it.
And that, if I may say so, is no small thing in a world where so many people seem to get their information from staring into a glowing rectangle and scrolling until their thumbs go numb.
I’m not trying to be snide.
Well, perhaps only a little.
But I do think there is something tremendously valuable in a hobby that keeps the mind sharp and gently drags you into places, dates and facts you’d never otherwise know.
Collectors carry an astonishing amount of it around in their heads.
So yes, the world changes.
But I do think collectors preserve something the modern world sheds rather too casually: Knowledge and memory.
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Wise Words about what we do
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