I started collecting when I was eight years old because my mother gave me a starter stamp collector’s kit for my birthday. It came with a paperback album, a small cloth bag with a few dozen used postage stamps, a pair of tweezers, a plastic magnifying glass, and an envelope full of glassine “hinges.” The hinges were quite ingenious, I thought. They were folded slips of translucent paper with a water-soluble adhesive on one side you used to hold the stamps on the album page. According to the instructional pamphlet, they were guaranteed to not harm the delicate paper stamps as long as you didn’t use them on unused stamps that still have gum on the back. It was all quite technical, almost scientific, to my eight-year-old self.
Stamp collecting is the hobby of kings and presidents, according to the pamphlet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s picture was on the cover. Dapper and bespectacled, he examines a stamp, undoubtedly rare, through a magnifying glass that would have done Sherlock Holmes proud. The pamphlet also said that Benjamin Franklin invented stamps, or the postal service, or something like that. I was in good company as a stamp collector, which was good since we were moving around from one part of town to another and I didn’t have a lot of friends at the time.
There were important rules in the pamphlet and I tried to follow them to the letter. You never touch the stamps with your fingers lest the oil from your skin ruin them. I didn’t even know my skin had oil on it, although my fingers were often sticky with peanut butter. I was impressed, too, by the erudite way the pamphlet used a lot of words like “lest.” Instead of your fingers, you were supposed to handle the stamps only with the tweezers just to be safe.
You began by dumping the stamps out of the cotton bag onto a clean surface where you could sort them with your tweezers and examine them with your plastic magnifying glass. It was all quite scientific. The paperback album had pictures of stamps arranged alphabetically by country and the idea was you somehow found the stamps that matched the pictures and mounted them in the album using the glassine hinges. Each picture had a short caption, too, like “Victory at Monmouth – 1778” or “Howler Monkey – Guatemala” that described the theme of the stamp.
Along with the pamphlet in the kit was a form you could use to order assortments from each country to build your collection. I thought that was a good idea because how else would I find postage stamps from Cambodia or Upper Volta? The assortments were kind of expensive, though, especially for a kid whose mother put food on the table by ironing other women’s laundry because his stepfather couldn’t hold a job. My grandmother slipped me a quarter now and then, though, so I could buy stuff if I saved up.
I couldn’t afford the assortments, but the company offered unsorted used stamps packed in one pound bags—enough stamps to keep a kid busy for months, soaking them off the envelope scraps they came on, sorting them by country, then trying to match the stamps to the pictures in the album. There were an awful lot of duplicates in the pound of stamps, so you saved them to trade with other stamp collectors in case you ever met any.
I was ten when Mom finally left my stepfather and moved my brothers and me to the cellar of my grandmother’s tavern. I earned fifty cents every week cleaning the tavern floor, so I could finally feed my stamp collecting habit. I got a real album, three-ring loose-leafed, and found a hobby shop downtown I could reach on my bike. There, I could buy individual stamps to fill out the collection without sorting through the garbage that came in the one-pound bags. I couldn’t ever afford the rare ones, but there were millions and millions of common stamps to peruse, maybe acquire, and certainly enough to keep me busy and my mind occupied.
I’ll check the attic one of these days and see if I can’t find my stamp collection. I don’t want to add any more stamps to it, but I’d like to look at it as a reminder of how far I’ve come.