The stamp collection

Red, plastic bells stretched across the front of the house, and a wreath of cedar, fir and holly hung on the door. It was almost Christmas and inside a potluck dinner for the dinner bridge group hosted by my parents was spread on a counter in casserole dishes and platters.
The mood was boisterous. My father was a theater professor, and his colleagues never lacked for drama. They reveled in a story well told and bridge game gatherings and other social events tended to be loud, with lots of laughter and broad gestures for emphasis.
In a bridge game, when your partner wins the bid, you lay down your cards face up on the table and, your partner plays your cards. You are, as they say in bridge, the dummy.
Near the midpoint of the evening, my father waited until his partner won the bid. He laid down his cards by suit, hearts and clubs, diamonds and spades, wished his partner luck, excused himself from the table, went to the bathroom and behind a closed door collapsed from a massive heart attack. He was technically alive when a guest discovered him a few minutes later, but only technically. He never regained consciousness.
In the days that followed, family members arrived from the far-flung corners of the country, and we tended to flower deliveries, accepted gifts of home-cooked meals and gratefully welcomed friends and relatives. At some point my mother gathered a few things that were my father’s and asked if people were interested in them. I’m not sure why, but when she asked if anyone wanted my father’s stamp collection, I said, “I’ll take it.” Maybe in my grief I was just being protective of things that reflected his life, or maybe it was because no one else seemed to care, and I thought someone should. I’m not sure. Whatever motivated me, weeks later I found myself back home opening the cardboard box.
Inside was a handsome album full of stamps, hinged and labeled. There was a flimsy wooden box with a sliding lid that contained some loose stamps, a bundle of early letters rescued from my Aunt Pearl’s belongings that dated to the late 1850s (with stamps), some postcards (stamped) and a collection of first-day covers -- envelopes carrying fancy cancellations from the first day a stamp was issued.
Tucked in among the envelopes, I found a small, brown notebook. In a cursive hand, it was titled:
 
“Interesting & Useful Things About Stamps”
 
It was dated 1930 and copyrighted, obviously a draft of a planned book. My father, Harold Obee, was the author, and by the 1930 date, was just 15 years old when he created it.
That brought a chuckle. I can’t ever remember a time when my father wasn’t professorial, some now would say “nerdy,” and here was documentary evidence to prove that was true long before I was born. The book was carefully outlined with Roman numerals. Chapter I would be the history of stamps, and the following chapters would deal with how to start a collection, how stamps are sold, how to correctly mount them, and on and on. At the top of one page, he even considered the typography. His draft held this scrawled reminder:
 
“Jokes to fill up rest of page at the end of chapters.” 
            
I always knew my father was a stamp collector. He bought me my own stamp album when I was quite young, and I can remember him towering over me as I soaked pieces of envelopes in water to remove their stamps. I remember he would occasionally dole out stamps to me that were duplicates from his own collection, but I never suspected this hobby was more than an idle pursuit for him. The loose notes I found with his stamp album, the unfinished book and the care with which he assembled his collection in the late 20s and early 1930s, made me realize this hobby was among the first things in this world to thoroughly engage him, and he probably had many fond memories of his early collecting. It was 1930 after all, in the heart of the Depression, and the world around him wasn’t offering a lot of promise.
Knowing all of that, it’s easy to picture him at his own small desk in his own world as he spread the stamp collector’s tools of measurement and close inspection in front of him and immersed himself in the swirls of fine engravings and subtle color variations. It’s easy to picture because all my life I had seen my father in just that pose, surrounded by his books with a desk lamp pulled down low, making careful notations on a manuscript in front of him. So this is where all of that started? This was where he first honed his scholarly approach? Stamps?
From the collection, it’s clear he was only seriously active as a collector in the early to mid 1930s. By far, most of the loose stamps are from that time. But among the items in the box with the album were first day covers from as late as the mid 1980s, proof that his interest continued. And I know he put albums in the hands of every one of his children, I’m sure in the hope that they might also learn as he learned and fall into that world he had known and loved when he was a teenager.  Suddenly, I knew why I had his stamp collection. I had to put it in order.
I’ve never really been fascinated by stamps, and I knew almost nothing about them. You always hear about rare and very valuable stamps, so of course that was my first thought as I waded in, but you learn pretty quickly that for most stamp collectors, an example worth $50 is a major find and most of the values for frequently encountered stamps seldom top a few bucks. Before too long my focus changed from value to the beauty of the fine engravings on those early stamps and the history they document. National parks canonized. Major historical events remembered. Famous presidents honored. Early airmail stamps featuring zeppelins are very popular.
Fortunately, it was easy to get oriented. My focus was basically the first 100 years of stamps in the United States, because that’s what I had in front of me. That’s the first lesson of stamp collecting. Limit yourself to an era, or a country, or a type of stamp. I began.
The first official stamp was issued by the federal government in the United States on July 1, 1847. To review which stamps were issued after that, one need only consult the Scott stamp catalog.
J.W. Scott, a stamp dealer in New York, published his first stamp catalog in 1868, assigning numbers to each postage stamp and drawing distinctions between them. This was necessary because some stamps to the naked eye look quite similar, but on close inspection are from a different engraving or are of a different color.
The first Scott catalog quickly became the key reference work for collectors, and today the Scott numbering system is the main framework for collectors in the United States. The original catalog was a 21-page pamphlet. Today the Scott catalog has more than 5,000 pages. Not only does it number, identify and price stamps from the United States, it lists virtually all stamps used for postage from around the world. The catalog has had such an impact that today some stamps are more recognizable as a Scott number than from their physical description.
The first thing I noticed about my father’s stamp collection was that the Scott numbers did not always line up. At first I thought this was because my father made mistakes in his identification, but then I realized the numbering system was altered over the years, with numbers added and certain stamps winning the right to have their own Scott number. So that was the first chore; checking to see if my father’s initial identification was correct and had stood the test of time.
I also occasionally heard that my father had some rare confederate stamps, so I turned to that section of the album. There were only two. One appeared to be a Scott CSA #6 or #7, but the color was wrong. I trolled the Internet and found a very helpful site on confederate stamps and emailed my questions:
“I have an unused CSA #6 or #7, not sure which. The color is what has me baffled. It is clearly a light green. I suppose you could say it is a blue green, but it is definitely different than the examples on your site. Is there a history of color differences with this stamp, or are we just dealing with a blue stamp whose color has changed over the years?”
Almost immediately, I got the following answer:
 “The blue-green color of a CSA #6 stamp is probably the New York Counterfeit. You can read about the New York Counterfeit and see an example in the fake stamps section on my website,” responded John L. Kimbrough at, where else, www.csastamps.com.
“I hate to tell you this Dad, but your rare confederate stamp is a fake,” I said to myself. I could almost hear him talk back. “Well, I’ll be darned,” he would have said.
For an aspiring stamp collector, it doesn’t take long to know and identify the main groupings of important U.S. stamps issued from 1847 to 1947. They are clearly identified in the Scott catalog, or in any book on stamp collecting.
One series that is popular with collectors is the first commemorative stamp set. Called the Columbian Issue, it is 16 stamps that mark the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They are quite beautiful and range from a 1 cent to a $5 stamp. The stamps with values of a dollar or more in good condition can bring prices ranging from $1,500 to $10,000. The higher the face value, generally, the fewer that were printed and the rarer they are today. Of course, a full set of Columbians would be a necessary part of any serious American collection. My father’s collection contained seven, all the more common 10 cent and under face values.
As is the case with antiques or other collectibles, the goal is to find stamps in unused, mint condition, finely printed and well centered on the paper, and the best stamps still have all the original gum on the back. While using stamp hinges to mount stamps is popular, for a mint condition stamp it is better to keep them unhinged and mounted in plastic sleeves. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to find mint examples of the early stamps, or, if you can find them, they are expensive. To fill in your collection, you can settle for ones that are used for a fraction of the price.
I suppose, at may age, I should quit being surprised that my father is still teaching me, even all these years after his death in 1989. I also shouldn’t be surprised I am still learning about him. Inside the pages of that stamp album and related ephemera his young voice speaks with a cadence and inflection that is warm and familiar. I haven’t become an ardent collector, or anything approaching that, but every so often, on rainy winter days, I pull out the album to spend some time with it, and it feels like a chance to talk to my father again. He is there in those loose sheaves of paper, in the careful script of his handwritten notes and in the hobby that gave him pleasure. And every time I learn something surprising about a stamp, or correct an error in the album, I feel like I am sharing that discovery with him again, just as I did some 60 years ago, when I was just becoming aware and his hand was guiding mine.
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