While ordering custom greeting cards online is nothing new (Hallmark has offered it since 2007) Apple’s Cards has a few distinctions that set it apart from the others:

• The portions of the cards that aren’t customized are letterpressed, so the quality is higher than anything else out there.
• It’s $2.99 a card, cheaper than anything similar you’d find in a store, and that price includes postage & mailing.
• Everything is done right from the phone, so it’s more convenient then, well, pretty much anything, making it as easy to send a card as a text message or an email.

The USPS seems to be doing the latter. Where once our postage stamps celebrated or best and brightest and our people, places and events of historical, artistic and scientific significance, recent years have seen increasing numbers of stamps that appear to have been issued just to get people to buy them. The Art of Disney stamps, the Star Wars stamps, the multiple Reagan stamps, for example. Which is not to say that there isn’t some merit in all of these subjects, but there comes a point where due diligence has been done in recognizing an achievement and you cross over into pandering.

At last, the national nightmare is over. Now we can have our own Britney stamps!

Actually, I have mixed emotions about this. I really love collecting US postage stamps, and would love for my own kids to be excited about it one day. The USPS has been losing money and really needs to find ways to increase revenue or it won’t survive. Is this the way to do it, though? Will people actually turn the life boats around and come rescue the USPS because they like the new stamps?

Now, the USPS has ended its ban on portraying living people on stamps. Call me a pessimist, but I don’t see anything good coming of this.

Who will decide who's worthy of being on a stamp?

This is something we’ve looked down on other countries for doing. The ban on honoring people on US stamps until five years after their death seems very wise to me. Our heroes have let us down so many times in recent years that insurance companies now offer scandal insurance, for when a corporate mascot like Tiger Woods gets involved in a sex scandal. Although there’s always been a certain amount of establishment propaganda inherent in any country’s postage stamps, the USPS has done a good job at being fairly neutral & populist throughout its history. How will it handle honoring the living on stamps, while trying to sell the greatest number of stamps?

It's only a matter of time...

There are huge numbers out there who would insist that Sarah Palin deserves to be on a stamp. Many others would say she’s just a corporate whore just playing a part to make money and deserves to be drowned in rancid baby vomit and fermented coyote urine. A decade from now people will most likely be saying, Sarah who? Will the USPS cave to popular demand and put the latest fad on a stamp? If they did, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. They’d be using Internet troll techniques to get attention, but at least it’d get people talking and thinking about the USPS, and that might ultimately be a good thing.

There’s lots that could be done to make the hobby relevant to a younger generation. This has nothing to do with trying to make philately seem “hip” or “with it” or “cool” because such attempts are always obvious to the target audience and inevitably make one look stupid. Instead, we should be asking what the barriers are that prevent that prevent new philatelists from enjoying the hobby to the fullest.

Such obstacles may be invisible to long-term collectors. Part of the fun of stamp collecting is knowing the value of the stamps in one’s collection, but how do you know what a stamp is worth? In the USA and Canada, the values are set by the Scott Catalog. The current catalogs weighs in at 6 volumes, is over 5000 pages and will set you back $599.94 if you buy it on Amazon. If you want to stay current, you have to buy the new edition every year. How welcoming is that to the new collector? That pretty much excludes everyone but the hardcore collectors and dealers from knowing the current value of their collection. Personally, I’m using a 2005 set that I picked up used. I figure it gives me a ballpark value that’s good enough for now.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. All these values could go online and be made available for a modest subscription fee. It could be so much more than just an online version of the paper catalog, though. Facial recognition software is becoming prevalent, and is affordable enough to include in cheap applications like iPhoto. Faces are far more complex than postage stamps. An application could be written for  whereby one could scan a stamp. The stamp would be instantly identified. The user would find out where and when it was published and the stamp’s current value. It could even link to the Wikipedia entry that relates to the content of the stamp. All this could be put into an app on a smart phone, so the user wouldn’t have to be tied to a computer to use it.

The limitations of such an application could be used as a “teachable moment.” With current technologies, the identification it provided would be a best guess. It would be able to identify the stamp, but not necessarily the condition, perforation, or grille. But when it encountered such things, it could offer guides that would teach the user how to make such distinctions.

Such an app could also be used to create a catalog of one’s collection, to keep track of what you have and to know what it’s current value is. It could alert you when values change, and present you with graphs of your progress. It would get rid of the drudge work of keeping track of all that and make it a dynamic and exciting process.

It could also be a tool for trading. You’d scan in your collection, including multiples. You’d set the status of as many of these multiples to “Offering.” Meanwhile, the application would be able to identify the gaps in your collection, such as the stamps you need to finish a set or complete a year. You’d set these to “Want.” You’d receive an alert when a match occurred and it would be up to you to make the trade. The trade would be tied into the value of the stamps, so both parties would be assured of a fair trade. Starting out you’d be limited to trades of low value. For each trade you made, however, you’d earn “trustworthiness” points. The higher your rating, the higher the value of the trade.

All this would be fairly simple with current technology. It would make philately more approachable and exciting for new collectors while providing valuable tools for more experienced collectors. Subscription fees could be kept low while providing Scott with increased revenue. The expensive part, gathering the data and setting the values, is already done, so it’s a matter of leveraging that data into a new medium. That medium doesn’t have the expense of physically producing a 6-volume set of books. It wouldn’t cannibalize the existing market for the print catalog because the average collector isn’t buying it anyway. It’d be a win for Scott and a win for philately.

This is one of my all-time favorite stamps. Keep in mind that this is all done with only black ink, in a space that’s 1.5″ by .5″, and yet the detail and lighting, the sense of depth and motion is just breathtaking. Our handsome young hero, after a long night’s battle, has vanquished the dragon. He looks up to greet the dawn of a new day, free from the terror and tyranny of the dragon.

Of course, this is another stamp that’s probably best without knowing the historical context. It’s from Russia, 1921, a few years after the October Revolution and just one year before the formation of the USSR. Most likely it’s shameless propaganda, and not an illustrating a classic folk tale. No matter. It has a timeless, mythic quality that transcends its original intent to become a masterpiece of illustration.

Sometimes I’m happier not knowing the backstory of things. Here are two beautiful stamps (click the pics for larger views). The scans don’t really do them justice. They’re breathtaking in real life. And yet, they don’t make a whole lot of sense. Ecuador, a small South American country, celebrates the sesquicentennial of the US Constitution. Sure, it’s worth celebrating, but these stamps are larger by far than any other stamp published in Ecuador in 1939. They’re a five-color print job when most stamps published in the world at this were one color, occasionally two. They’re far more elaborate than any other stamp published in Ecuador at this time. They’re an order of magnitude more impressive than the US stamp celebrating the same event:

So, I don’t know if the Ecuadorians were genuinely that excited about the US Constitution, or if this was some way of sucking up to the boss. I’m glad I don’t, because I can pretend it was the former and just enjoy the stamps for the beautiful things they are.

In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!

The LWA blog gives a lot of attention to stamps, as well, but from a much more humanistic perspective than other philatelic blogs I’ve seen. It celebrates  stamps as beautiful things in and of themselves, without regard to how rare they are, or how much they’re worth. It recognizes a value of stamps that many philatelists ignore: these are things that are created to transport a letter from one human to another. This is something that occasionally is almost overwhelming when I’m working on my collection. There’s a history in a canceled stamp. Someone bought that stamp. Their tongue moistened it and their hand pressed it on an envelope. Very old stamps would have been hand sorted and hand canceled. A mailman (or femailman as the case may have been) walked up to the mailbox and dropped it in. Somebody received that letter and read its contents. It could have been anything from a love letter to a bill to an advertisement, but it was a communication from one person to another, enabled by the stamp. How many hands did that stamp pass through before it came into my collection? “Used, hinged,” is second only to “damaged” as the most worthless of stamps, but think about who soaked that stamp off its envelope and put it into an album, and who else pulled that stamp out of the album. In my stamp collection there are connections to hundreds of thousands of people who I can never know anything about! But I digress. The LWA blog doesn’t necessarily talk about any of that, but it reminds me that stamps can be about more than just the physical fact of the stamp, and that’s a great thing!

I’m tempted to join the LWA. Membership is only $3. But to be honest, it’d make me feel a little hypocritical. My actual letter writing happens once a year with our annual pantheistic  holiday card. Maybe this is because I never really learned how to write a casual letter. Letter writing for me was always about seduction and foreplay. I was always awkward with the spoken word, but in print I could be Casanova. I’d choose paper and ink as carefully as my words, and often the letters were epic multimedia montages. All to win or to sustain the love of a distant damsel.

This was back before email and Unlimited Family and Friends calling plans. Think about that for a moment. Every communication with a distant somebody took real effort and cost money. Do people even write real, physical love letters anymore? Or do they just send a text message?

There are qualities of physical letters that email will never capture. There are possibilities for communication that only exist in physical form. I’m glad the Letter Writers Alliance is around to help us remember that!

Funny, I don't remember Elvis' trip to Mongolia!

It could be that the Mongolians truly celebrate cultural diversity, and Elvis is an important cultural figure to them. Given that Elvis’ music would have been suppressed by the Communist government until the 90s, I’m not sure how that could be. It seems like the great Mongolian guitarist Enh-Manlai would be a much more fitting subject for such an homage as this series of stamps and souvenir sheets.

Elvis's heart burned bright, even as a child...

Here’s the thing. Mongolia realized a long time ago that they could be making money off stamps. Not from their own people (even today, 20% of the population lives on less than $1.20 a day), but from foreign collectors. So, while Mongolia was a Communist country, closely aligned to the Soviet Union and suppressing Western thought amongst it’s citizens, it was also issuing stamp after stamp celebrating the US Space program (and cats, dinosaurs, and other collector-popular topicals).

Forget the babe. Notice that Elvis is escaping a nuclear explosion in a flying British hot rod while Giant Elvis plays on...

So none of these stamps may have ever graced the surface of a letter sent by a Mongolian, or have seen the inside of a Mongolian post office. The could have all been sold straight to Western collectors.

It's the guitar-penis-motorcycyle-rocket that does it for me!

Of course, I’m probably biased about this. Growing up in the US of A, my philatelic obsession during my grade school years was with US commemoratives. These celebrate our important historic events, our cultural, political and military heroes, and other things that are, or should be, important to us as US citizens. When Edgar Allen Poe is on a US stamp, for example, he’s there because he’s one of the most important literary figures in US history. It’s hard to picture a cabal of postal workers saying, “If we put Poe on a stamp, those Poe fans will buy millions. MILLIONS!”

It just seems to me that putting something on a stamp just to get people to buy it is really tacky. Something only a fallen empire would do, or a country that’s hard up for cash would do.

Oh yeah, right…

A sign of a postal system in trouble.

Wow. That’s almost as cheesy as the Mongolian Elvis Celebration! It’s a fine line, really. Elvis is a significant figure in musical history who deserves to be commemorated, on the one hand. On the other hand, there’s a difference between commemoration and exploitation in order to sell a product. Star Wars, the original 1977 movie, changed filmmaking forever. It is a significant cultural event. Darth Maul and Princess Amadalla aren’t part of the event. This stamp sheet doesn’t commemorate the historical event. It’s an advertisement for the Star Wars marketing empire, and it exists strictly because Star Wars fans will buy it.

It embarrasses me that my own country is now engaging in such practices. But I guess if that’s what it takes for them to survive…

Jewish Chess Masters on Stamps!

Still, I guess there would be something kind of fun about collecting something so specific as Jewish chess masters. It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever have a complete album of every stamp ever published in Hungary. However, the collector of Jewish chess masters on stamps has a reachable goal. Chicks would TOTALLY dig it, too! “Hey baby, come back to my place and check out my collection of Jewish chess master stamps. I’ve got every one ever published…”

A year later the Civil Rights movement would begin, and those signs would change:

The book was part of set called My First Stamp Outfit: The Ideal Outfit for the Beginning Stamp Collector. Along with the album, it also included a magnifying glass, hinges, flag and coat-of-arms stickers, and stamps. Everyone one would need to start collecting! Unfortunately, for the boy or girl who got this gift, stamp collecting didn’t really click. There’s a half-hearted attempt to place a few stamps, and they didn’t even put in all the flag stickers before they gave up.

In the back of the album there’s even a place to fill the Boy Scout Stamp Collecting Merit Badge:

Do they still have that? Or have they replaced it with an Gay Bashing merit badge yet?

Contrast My First Stamp Album with a contemporary version of the idea:

Here we see one of the reasons why there are so few new stamp collectors. For My First Stamp Album, they actually hired an artist to paint a cover that portrays stamp collecting as something that’s fun and interesting for kids. They really try to relate it to kid’s lives, tying stamp collecting into other things they might be into (dogs, Scouting, cute girls in pigtails…). The new version looks like someone just threw a bunch of random stamps onto a scanner, slapped some text on there and said “Good enough.” The only way one might suspect that this might be a fun thing to do is that it says FUN KIT on it. Seriously, who are you trying to sell to here? Who are you trying to attract?

I wonder what a modern version of My First Stamp Album might look like. My own first stamp album, given to my by my brother Jeff when I was 4, if I remember correctly, had a picture of a magic genie’s lamp, spewing a cloud of world stamps from the spout. It really captured what stamp collecting was for me back then. It was a kind of magic. Each stamp was a gateway to wonderful things and places I’d never known about: space ships, exotic animals, cathedrals, masks, distant landscapes and infinitely more. To be honest, it’s still that way to me!

It could be that way to a new generation as well, if someone tried.

What to collect is the easy part. For beginners, my advice is collect everything. This is contrary to most beginner advice I’ve read, which says to choose an area. I can see their point, I guess. There are an awful lot of stamps out there, spanning more than 160 years. It’s a lot less overwhelming to collect, say, just the stamps that have butterflies on them, the stamps of a specific country, or stamps published in your birth year or whatever. However, while this might be a direction you want to move toward eventually, I think it’s a real mistake to start out that way. It’s sort of like advising someone who’s learning to cook to start by eating eat cornflakes and milk and only cornflakes and milk because the grocery store is just so big and overwhelming. Over time you can try some 2% milk, and a different brand of cornflakes, and later on maybe go crazy and try a different kind of cereal… Sure, that’s safe, but you’ll have a much more rewarding experience if you try everything, experiment, learn, discover new things you love. If you start collecting everything, you’ll find certain things resonate with you better than others, and you can focus then. Unless you’re like me, and you’ll discover that you find everything fascinating. My collection is a sprawly, unfocused mess, but so what! It makes me happy!

The matter of where used to be a simple one. There was a time before text messaging and Unlimited Off-Peak hours. There was a time, even, when the Internet didn’t exist and there was no email, just mail (aka snailmail). Back then people wrote letters. Letters were written on paper using a pencil or pen, or sometimes typed on a typewriter. These were folded up and put into envelopes to be sent to friends and loved ones. The stamp paid the price for delivery. At this time, letters were the cheapest and most effective way of communicating more than a few sentences. Talking on the phone for more than a minute or to anyone who didn’t live within a few miles of you cost more than it did to send a letter, so everyone did it. It wasn’t just a craft, artsy or quaint way to send information. It was how we communicated!

So, anyway, back then there were a whole lot more stamps lying around, and because people cared about their letter writing, they’d go out of their way to buy pretty & interesting commemorative stamps instead of using the generic and awful “flag over porch” style of stamp. There also wasn’t as much of a stigma against stamp collecting as there is today, so you could announce to your friends and family that you collected stamps and please save stamps off envelopes for you. It was actually a great way to entertain kids (and by kids I mean me. I’m just assuming that there are others out there who had the same experience). When I was a kid, my aunts, uncles and grandparents knew I collected stamps, and they’d save them for me all year. When my parents would go visit them, I’d have a box full of stamps to sort through while the grownups visited. Back then it was possible to grow a decent stamp collection just through social networks.

Nowadays, though, actual stamped letters are becoming increasingly rare, and building a stamp collection is probably going to mean buying some stamps. Unfortunately, the days when you could buy packets of world stamps at the local drug store are gone. Maybe you’re lucky enough to live near a hobby shop that sells stamps. I don’t know that I am. The only stores around here that say they sell stamps seem really sketchy. They have big, hand-painted signs up that say they also buy & sell GOLD and GUNS. Somehow I have a really hard time associating stamps and guns. I suppose there are some gunslinging prospectors out there who trade in their gold for stamps, or maybe some stamp collectors who have such valuable collections they philaticize with a Glock in one hand and stamp tongs in the other. Since I’m neither of these, I don’t go into such places, though maybe I’m missing out! Since going to the store is out for me, and I suspect, for most people, that leave the post office, mail order, and the Internet.

The local post office is actually a great option for buying stamps. The selection is typically very limited: unused stamps published within the last few months of whatever country you’re in. However, you’re paying face value for the stamps, instead of an inflated dealer price. One cool thing about collecting unused stamps (in the US at least) is that every unused stamp issued since the Civil War is still valid for postage. So the stamps you buy are going to be worth face value, at the very least! Plus post offices are conveniently located everywhere.

However, buying stamps at the post office is still fairly limited. Why stick with the current moment of your own country when there’s a whole world with a rich history to explore?

One way to explore this history is by using an approval service. Approval services can be incredibly cool, and I don’t know of anything like them outside of philately. With an approval service, people will send you stamps on a regular basis. The stamps are organized into sets in glassine envelopes. You don’t pay for them up front. They actually trust you with their stuff! It’s a nice feeling! You pick the sets you like and send the rest back, along with payment for what you’ve kept. Then they send you another bunch of stamps and the process repeats for as long as you want it to go on.

Unfortunately, approval services have a dark side, which is why I don’t use them. Every approval service I’ve used escalated. The first few months were small numbers of affordable sets. But then they started sending more and more stamps, at higher prices, and new offers for things I might be interested in, until it became annoying and inconvenient, and I had to cancel all of them. It’s really unfortunate because if they’d kept it constant, I’d still be getting most of my stamps through approval services. Perhaps there’s an option for that, but I couldn’t find it. Still, for those first few months, approval services are a great way to start!

So far, the best way I’ve found for getting a whole bunch of stamps is through eBay. I recommend searching for “kiloware” or “mission mix.” These are just big boxes of stamps, usually unsorted. Unsorted may mean you’ll wind up with a large number of identical stamps, but it can also mean there are hidden treasures that didn’t get separated out. Mission mix traditionally are stamps that have been gathered, not by stamp dealers but by church groups or other charitable organizations to sell to collectors raise money for their activities. You can often pick up several pounds of mission mix for tens of dollars on eBay. Even if you don’t find any treasures, the entertainment value alone of searching through that many stamps far outweighs the cost! Kiloware and mission mix comes in 2 varieties, off-paper and on-paper. Off-paper costs much more than on-paper because with on-paper stamps you’ll have to put in the work of getting the envelope scraps off the stamps. Also, the paper the stamps are on far outweighs the stamps. In a pound of on-paper stamps, you’ll get several hundred stamps, while off-paper you’ll get thousands.

Once you’ve got your bunch of stamps, the fun starts!