Stamp Collecting, by Kevin

Stamp collecting is ace. A lot of people think that it is not ace, but they are wrong. Stamp collecting means collecting stamps that are used on envelopes, envelopes being folded pieces of paper that are used to send love letters, birthday cards, electricity bills, ransom notes, death threats, lockets of hair, money, fingernails, and so on, through the post (but not ears—you are thinking of the film Blue Velvet, which was fiction—the envelope would fall apart because of all the blood). Stamps can be used as an alternative to currency, and because all the mail in the United Kingdom belongs to the queen, this makes her a very rich woman. Most of her wealth comes from stamps. People generally do not realize this, which is probably why so many of them think stamp collecting is crap instead of really good.

Another man who made a lot of money as a result of stamp collecting is the slum landlord Nicholas van Hoogestraten. He got his start in slum landlordism from selling his stamp collection for £30,000, which was a lot of money in the 1960s, which is when this was when it was. Hoogestraten had such an excellent stamp collection because his father was a shipping agent, who obtained stamps from all over the world for his son as a result. My father works for the Gas Board in Cheltenham. When I began my collection in the 1970s, it was with Green Shield stamps. Green Shield stamps are like postage stamps except they cannot be used as postage. Nonetheless, they can be exchanged for real things, such as the Ronco Electric Cat Brush/Harmonica and the K-Tel Telescopic Oven Radio. My father would let me stick all the Green Shield stamps in the special Green Shield stamp album and for a few weeks the entire collection was mine, until he went to the shops and exchanged it for something useful. This, for me, was like magic and inspired me to begin my collection.

Some people who are "into" stamp collecting like to collect stamps from lots of different countries from all around the world, but what is the point of that? There are millions of stamps in the world, and they will never collect all of them. Personally, I prefer to focus on one stamp, which comes from a country in Africa known as Zaire. The genius of this is that Zaire stopped making stamps in 1997, probably when everybody got mobile phones and email, so there is only a finite number of Zairean stamps to collect.

Zairean stamps come in two denominations: the 12 makuta stamp, for local letters, and the 3-zaire stamp, for overseas letters. There are far fewer 3-zaire stamps because people in Zaire did not send many letters abroad. They didn't get on. Consequently, this gives me a much better chance of cornering the market in 3-zaire stamps. So far, I have 4,713 3-zaire stamps. Some of them are mint. I am not entirely sure how many 3-zaire stamps were made altogether, but there can't be many more to go. Then I shall have a monopoly and will be able to charge whatever I like for them. Alternatively, I could use them as my own personal stamp, putting them on envelopes so that the recipients will know that they are from me. But that would probably be a waste.

Do not forget when you are mounting your stamps that you should not lick the reverse of the stamp when you put it in your album. If you do this, it will be impossible to remove the stamp from the album when you want to use it to send letters or to sell to someone, and your mother will have to cut around it very carefully, using scissors. Not normal scissors, either, but those special crimped ones that give wiggly edges. Like a stamp has. And even then the prospective customer may spot what you've done and not want to buy your stamp off you after all.

No. You must use special mounts. This will cut into your profits, of course, but it is probably still a worthwhile expense, because the last thing you want is to have book after book of entirely useless stamps worth bugger all on the open market festering in your attic. That would be a calamity. People would laugh at you, if they knew.

There now. I hope you will take up stamp collecting now that I have shown you how good it is. If you would like to buy some stamps from me, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Most of them are in really decent condition.

Thank you.


Kevin MacPherson is Stanley Gibbons Professor of Philately and Anal Retention at Guildford College of F.E.