The Joy of Stamps [antikvár]

IntroductionThis is a story of an ordinary stamp collector which I hope will appeal to ordinary stamp collectors everywhere.There are said to be at least two million collectors out there somewhere, gazing at our treasures, lost in our reveries ^ perhaps even four million, depending on whom you believe. The stamp industry as a whole is not well organised and there are conflicting figures and conflicting definitions. We all agree, however, that we are part of the World's Greatest Hobby. More people collect stamps than collect anything else. Hurray for philately.But who wants to read about an ordinary collector? Good question. After all Stanley Gibbons, the world's leading stamp dealer, is stuffed with experts, as are Sotheby's and the other famous auction houses, all of whom employ very knowledge-able stamp people. As for the stamp press, its pages are filled with perfectly formed philatelic prose, carefully carved out by the leaders of our distinguished philatelic societies and organi-sations. An outsider should step warily.The first answer is that collecting stamps is a hobby. Only the dealers and such-like do it professionally. The rest of us do it in the margins of our life. We are all ordinary collectors. Secondly, as an ordinary collector I find stamps both fun and funny and I have tried to write accordingly.The other day I met Basil Boothroyd, who has graced the pages of Punch for many years, and he asked me what I was doing. I muttered a few things, listed my latest prospects, including a so-called funny column about stamps. He stopped in his tracks. 'Dear boy, it must be a one-off.'I started writing about stamps in 1980, so you can see what an outsider I am, soon after I had begun to collect stamps. It was something I had not done since boyhood. For about thirty years I had not only ignored stamps, I treated collectors as joke figures, not worth taking seriously, obviously deprived, compensating for something unmentionable, pathetic specimens with their pathetic specimens. I used collecting stamps as my ultimate example of boringness, rating it only one step up from fretwork.