A new hobby?

Some weeks ago I came across a couple of stamp albums in a charity shop or a car boot sale and bought them for a few pounds each. I forget exactly where or exactly how much, but the thought was that maybe I ought to insure against getting fed up with jigsaws by taking a peek at some other sedentary hobbies. So why not stamps?

Not something I knew much about, other than being rather struck by Poirot planning to spend Christmas rearranging his stamp collection, an activity which looked to involve much poring over album with a delicate pair of tweezers poised for action. But now I know rather more.

The first album, a four ring binder with non-standard rings to which one can add supplementary pages to be had from the publisher on application, looks to date from the early seventies and according to the illustration is intended for the slightly serious collector of UK stamps. The very serious would need a rather more sophisticated album. What had not occurred to me was that the album would also serve as a catalogue with all the UK stamps there ever were (subject to the qualifications in the illustration) being illustrated life size in black & white and with the idea being that you stuck the actual stamp,when acquired, on top of the illustration. I am not sure that I would care to be marshalled and organised in quite this way: I would want blank pages on which I could organise my stamps in whatever way took my fancy on the day, so that I could, following Poirot, spend happy days rearranging my collection. I also find that every stamp has a unique NETTO reference number, presumably allocated by some shadowy committee with powers of life and death in the stamp world. This stamp is in, that stamp, the product of some excommunicate issuing authority, is out.

The first stamp possibility in this album is from 6th May 1840, this presumably being that glorious day when the British Empire gave postage stamps to the world. The first actual stamp, NETTO 149, dates from somewhere between 1912 and 1922, but they do not get thick on the ground until we get to the mid thirties. A little later we have an intriguing stamp issued for the 1948 Olympics, featuring a rather plump and semi naked lady angel, NETTO obscured by careless pasting. A little later still, I learn that there are regional stamps. And so it goes on.

The second album, comb bound, looks to date from the mid fifties and was published in the USA, 'The Majestic Stamp Album', featuring all the countries of the world and supported by both map and directory; in fact with rather more support apparatus than the limey album altogether. As befits an album published in the USA, the USA pages come first, followed by everywhere else in alphabetic order, an arrangement which should have assigned the United Kingdom to the back where it could be easily found. But what they have actually done is file our single page under 'Great Britain' where it is lost in the middle of the album.

Inspection reveals about a dozen stamps for Great Britain (a place said to be 'In Atlantic Ocean off North Europe, Area 89,041.'), one of which is actually an 8 shilling contract note which looks like a stamp. Is is a primitive form of stamp duty, payable on some class of lawyer paper? The British equivalent of the French 'papier timbré'?

Inspection also reveals a host of countries which either no longer exist or which I have never heard of, so stamp collecting could be justified on the grounds of political & geographical education. Cilicia. The Gilbert & Ellice Islands. German Offices in China. German new Guinea. Fernando Po. Western Ukraine. Zuzuland. Also a very busty & hairy naked lady on a stamp from Sweden. The very last actual stamp in the album is a half center from the British Virgin Islands (why do we allow this UK dependency, this fine tax haven, to issue stamps denominated in US dollars?), featuring a rather odd looking white cove, presumably a pirate, an entirely appropriate person to stand for such a place. Presumably also there is an even more shadowy committee worrying about all this and one wonders whether it is incorporated under the UNESCO banner. Would Professor Google know?

This album also goes in for illustrations of stamps, but presumably the illustrations are representative rather than exhaustive, an arrangement which my tidy minds finds quite unsatisfactory.

I think for the moment that I pass. But I can see why and how one might get into it.