I’m a collector and, I think, a rather eclectic collector. My addiction began when I was eight. Stamp collecting…the young boy’s introduction to color, pattern, money, history, fine art and geography. Stamp collecting is a symphony of harmonic, yet distinct, emotional and cerebral triggers. It started with Sister Mary Lauretta’s connection with her order’s missions in China. I was a sick little child attending Catholic school and was often homebound. The good sister, without being aware of its future impact, set a huge envelope of Chinese stamps snipped from letters she had received. These nuns were sent to China before the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) because most of the stamps had pictures of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Who knows how many of these religious ladies survived? I’ll have much to say about this later.
Interesting how postage stamps tell a story. German stamps have their own tragic tale to tell. In my catalog are stamps between the years after WW1 and before WW2 (i.e. stamps engraved with von Hindenburg and Hitler). A difficult time for Germany, warranted or not. The Treaty of Versailles, in which the allied victors dictated the terms, contained arguably punitive provisions that eventually caused the economic collapse for Germany. The draconian requirement to repay war reparations ($33 billion) drove the value of the German mark into an inflation of epic proportions. A German postage stamp that once cost 100 marks soared to 125,000 marks. A 500 mark stamp climbed to 2 million marks. Inflation overcame Germany so quickly that the post office could not print the new stamps with new prices fast enough. Rather than print new stamps, they over franked the existing stamps with the new prices. I’ll have much to say about this later.
To be an eclectic collector for life is to be a life-long learner. It requires a desire to know. In that knowing you might start to recognize that everything is connected to everything in the human drama. To quote Yogi Berra, “You can see a lot just by observing.” The point I’m making is that even the tiniest collectible can stimulate.