Generally Speaking by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: stamp collecting, keller, philately
Publisher: Lawrence Block

Now I can’t say I approve of counterfeit stamps. But it’s hard for me to work up a lot of indignation at a forger who’s been dead for the better part of a century. I wouldn’t want to buy a fake sold as a genuine stamp, or an official reprint under the illusion that it’s an original, but in certain cases and at the right price any of these oddities might find a welcome in my collection. They all make the philatelic universe even more interesting.

Stamps and Their Infinite Variety

“Age cannot wither her,” Shakespeare’s Enobarbus says of Cleopatra, “nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

There are, I submit, worse things a man could say about a woman, but it wasn’t thoughts of women, however unwithered by age and unstaled by custom, that brought the line to mind. I was thinking about variety, and the infinite number of philatelic varieties, major and minor, which one can collect.

Or not collect.

And there, for the general collector, is a decision which has to be made time and time again. Does one make room in one’s collection for perforation varieties? For sideways watermarks? For color shadings? For inverted overprints?

I’ll tell you, it’s enough to make one envy the specialist. If, say, you confine your collection to a single country, you just grab up everything on offer. The smaller the country and the less extensive its philatelic output, the more reason you have to seek out its stamps and covers in all their variety.

Indeed, you’re virtually forced to do this—or it won’t be long before you’ll reach a point where the only stamps you lack are ones you can neither find nor afford, and what do you do then? Start a new collection? Take up golf?

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