Generally Speaking
Lawrence Block
Copyright 2011 by Lawrence Block
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Generally Speaking
A Philatelic Patchwork
By Lawrence Block
It was just about two and a half years ago that I wrote an essay about my own return to philately. By then I’d been collecting again for more than a dozen years, and I’d had occasion to write about stamps ever since Keller, my fictional assassin-for-hire, had himself returned to the hobby in the final chapter of Hit Man.
He’d been looking for something to keep him busy in his planned retirement, but if you’re a collector yourself you can probably guess what became of his retirement fund. Keller went on working—through Hit List, Hit Parade, and Hit & Run—and his philatelic adventures played an increasing role in his life, and in the books.
I think it was Michael Laurence, then editor of Linn’s Stamp News, who first took official notice of Keller. Other writers and other publications followed, with mentions and reviews. Randy Neal serialized several Keller stories in American Stamp Dealer & Collector. Charlie Peterson, sadly gone now, helped spread the word about Keller in the philatelic community, invited me to address the Tiffany Dinner at the American Philatelic Society convention in Hartford and, with Robert Odenweller, sponsored me for membership in the Collectors Club.
By the time Hit & Run was published, Keller had enough of a philatelic following to sustain a special philatelic edition of the book, signed, numbered and limited, with a custom made postage stamp tied to the title page with a special cancellation.
So that was all background to the aforementioned essay, “A Dream of Lost Stamps.” I sent it off to Michael Baadke, and before either of us quite knew what had happened, I had agreed to write and he to publish a monthly column consisting of the ruminations of a general collector. I called it Generally Speaking, and it’s appeared once a month ever since.
From
1976 to 1990, I wrote a monthly instructional column on fiction
writing for Writers
Digest.
That column yielded four books (Telling
Lies for Fun & Profit, Spider Spin Me a Web, The Liars Bible, and
The
Liar’s Companion)
and led indirectly to two others (Writing
the Novel from Plot to Print
and Write
for Your Life),
but that was by no means all it did for me. One way or another, it
informed both my reading and my writing. I’ve often thought it made
me a better writer.
After I’d been writing Generally Speaking for a few months, I realized how much I’d missed having a monthly slot to fill. But it wasn’t until I was well into the column’s second year that I brought over the kids—Arnold and Rachel and Edna and the gang—who’d served me so well in the Writers Digest days. If you haven’t met them yet, I can only hope you’ll enjoy making their acquaintance.
Has writing Generally Speaking made me a better philatelist? The question itself may be unwarranted, in that stamp collecting is essentially a pastime, and thus not a pursuit at which one succeeds or fails. But it seems clear to me that I’ve gotten more from the hobby by virtue of having to come up with a couple of thousand words every month. For some of the columns, I’ve had to sift my own experience and examine my own feelings and perceptions on a particular subject. For others, I’ve had to inform myself on various topics in order to convey that information to my readers.
I’ve been rewarded, too, by the response I’ve had throughout the past two and a half years. It’s a rare column that doesn’t bring email from readers, many of them sharing their own thoughts and experience.
Occasionally readers will tell me that my column led them to my books—to Keller, most often, but sometimes to my other fiction as well. And Keller fans often express the hopeful thought that the books might draw new entrants to the hobby, or at least render it a bit less unfathomable to them. (“Thanks to Keller, my wife finally thinks what I’m doing isn’t completely hare-brained,” one fellow wrote.)
I’ve
often thought that I could make a column out of some of these emails,
and someday perhaps I shall. Meanwhile, though, I’ve made a book
out of the first 25 columns. The world of ePublishing is such that
I’m able to do this readily, and at little expense. What I haven’t
been able to do is include the illustrations which accompanied the
column in the pages of Linn’s.
It’s
possible to thus illustrate an eBook, but it’s beyond my personal
level of expertise, and would raise costs prohibitively.
So all you get here is words. And you get them pretty much as they appeared in the magazine, because I haven’t attempted to edit the columns, or to hide the fact that they are indeed columns and were written one by one over a period of twenty-five months.
Throughout those months, I have had the great good fortune to work with a superb editor, Michael Baadke. Those mere words to which I’m limited are insufficient to convey what a thoughtful and sensitive editor he has proven to be; any editor who would allow a writer to hang the title “How Much is That Dachshund in the Fenster?” on a column about the 1923 inflation in Germany is worth his weight in Penny Blacks.
It is my great pleasure to dedicate this book to Mike. I hope he won’t mind sharing this distinction, such as it is, with my wife, Lynne, whose unflinching acceptance of the time and money I devote to little scraps of paper is quite remarkable.
Just
a month ago, I completed the fifth Keller book, Hit
Me. Mulholland
Books will publish it in February, 2013, and we’re now in the
process of planning the philatelic edition; it will be a cut above
the one I got out on my own for Hit
& Run,
and should be a beautiful and finely-printed volume. Details, as soon
as I have them, will be on my blog and website.
Which
reminds me—I ought to give you my contact information. Here it
is:
Contact information:
Email: lawbloc@gmail.com
Blog: http://lawrenceblock.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawrence.block
Website:
www.lawrenceblock.com
Twitter:
@LawrenceBlock
Table
Of Contents
3. The Miracle of Empty Spaces
5. Buying the Same Stamp Twice
7. The Abiding Patience of Stamps
11. Philately and the “H” Word
12. The Synergy of Travel and Philately
13. Condition, Condition, and Condition
14. Filling Spaces
15. Stamps and Their Infinite Variety
16. The Philatelic Upside of War
17. How Much is That Dachshund in the Fenster?
19. My First Cover
22. Drinking Myself to Bolivia
23. A Book for a Desert Island
24. Maintenance
25. Album Bulge and Other Afflictions
I
sat up, stared at my wife. “Why,” I demanded, “did you sell my
hat?”
She stared right back at me.
“Oh, it must have been a dream,” I said. “You know that fedora of mine, with the hole in the crown that looks like a cigarette burn? I dreamed you sold it for ten dollars.”
“Why would I sell your hat?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. But it was a dream, so—”
“And why would anybody buy it? It’s an old worn–out hat and there’s a hole in it.”
“I know.”
“Ten dollars,” she said. “If anybody wants to pay ten dollars for that hat, I’m all for selling it. But I’d ask you first. I mean, it’s your hat.”
We were in Listowel, a town in North Kerry, in the West of Ireland, and I didn’t know then and don’t know now why I should have dreamed about my hat, and the selling thereof. Maybe it was something in the water. If so, it was still there a day later, because I awoke the next morning fresh out of another harrowing dream, and I shot Lynne a look that would have curdled milk.
“My stamp collection,” I said.
“Your stamp collection?”
“Why did you—oh, hang on, it must have been another dream.”
“And just what did I do this time?”
“You sold my stamp collection.”
“I did no such thing,” she said. “Wait a minute. What kind of dream is this, anyway? What stamp collection? You don’t have a stamp collection.”
The day before, when I’d discovered that she hadn’t sold my old hat after all, I had felt an inexplicable sense of relief. And now, realizing she hadn’t sold my stamps, I felt nothing so much as a bottomless sense of loss. Because she was right, she hadn’t sold my stamp collection. How could she? Twenty years earlier, before we’d even met, I’d sold it myself.
I
must have been seven or eight years old, and I was born in 1938, so
you can do the math. I was at my grandparents’ house for a family
dinner, and one of my mother’s two brothers showed me a book of
stamps. Both Hi and Jerry had collected as boys, and one of them had
his album there, and I looked at it and could see right away that
collecting stamps would be a Good Thing to Do.
Then somebody gave me a Modern Stamp Album and a packet of hinges, and my Aunt Nettie began supplying me with stamps. She was my mother’s aunt, and she worked as secretary to the president of Trico, a local firm that supplied windshield wipers to the world. Trico did a lot of business overseas, and Nettie opened the mail and clipped off the corners of the envelopes with the stamps. And gave them to me.
I dutifully soaked them off their paper backing, dried them, found room for them in my stamp album, and hinged them in place. A lot of them, as I recall, were from South and Central America.
When my collection grew outgrew that first album, I upgraded to a two–volume Scott’s International. I still got stamps from Aunt Nettie, and I bought some as well from approval dealers. “Have fun,” one advertised. “Add thousands of stamps to your collection with my bargain–priced penny approvals.”
I think I had just started high school when I decided to specialize. I received the birthday present I requested, the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania. This must have been in 1952–3, because it ended with the last of the George VI issues—and that struck me as a perfectly fine place to stop. I didn’t want to keep up with new issues. I wanted to concentrate on the stamps for which my album had spaces.
But by my senior year in high school, I’d lost interest. I certainly didn’t want to sell my collection, I figured I’d get back to it someday, but for the time being I was content to leave it on the shelf.
When
I resumed collecting, I was out of college and married, with a kid on
the way. And now it was coins, not stamps. I started out going
through rolls of coins from the bank, and in very little time was
serious about the pastime, joining coin clubs, attending auctions,
and devoting a good deal of time and much of my discretionary income
to the hobby.
Next thing I knew I was writing for a couple of numismatic publications, and one of them offered me a job. We up and moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where I edited the Whitman Numismatic Journal and handled various other chores in the coin supply division.
And that sent me back to stamps.
After eight hours at a desk mucking about with numismatics, I very much wanted a change when I got home. And of course my stamp album had made the trip to Racine, and so I took it up and returned wholeheartedly to philately. I had a couple of dealers sending me approvals, and I took the train to Chicago once or twice and spent some time and money at stamp shops in the Loop. I continued to collect stamps for that British Europe album, and I added another collection by picking up the Specialty Album for Benelux.
I stayed at Whitman until early 1966, then moved back to the New York area. I continued to collect, but other activities got first crack at my time and money. I’d go months without looking at my stamps.
In 1973 my marriage broke up, and I moved to a studio apartment in New York. And sometime that year or the next, because I sorely needed the money, I took both of those stamp albums to a dealer in midtown Manhattan. And that was that.
Sometimes,
over the years, I’d remember my days spent with hinges and tongs
and a perf gauge. But I didn’t spend much time thinking about my
stamps, because it always made me sad. Still, I don’t think I felt
the full impact of the loss until that morning in Listowel, when I
woke up from that dream.
I’d formed a few haphazard collections over the years, but hadn’t pursued anything with any seriousness. And the dream made me realize how much I missed it all.
The answer, of course, was to resume collecting stamps. But it took me a while to figure it out.
Nothing About Everything
In
scholarship as in philately, there are specialists and there are
generalists. And there’s a longstanding explanation of the
difference between the two. The specialist, it is said, keeps
learning more and more about less and less, until he knows everything
about nothing. The generalist, on the other hand, keeps learning
less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about
everything.
When I decided in my mid-fifties to return to a hobby I’d abandoned twenty years earlier, I didn’t know what sort of a collector I’d be. As a boy I’d started out collecting everything, then narrowed my focus to British Empire—specifically, to the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania. In my mid-twenties I’d begun collecting Benelux as well, and in my mid-thirties, when my first marriage ended, I sold everything.
Now I was starting over. Fine. I’d be a stamp collector again. But what would I collect?
Well, I’m a writer, and had accumulated a nice collection of portraits of writers from the old Vanity Fair. Why not collect writers on stamps? A little research revealed this to be an abundant topic, with most stamp-issuing countries given to honoring their literary stars philatelically. There was a sub-group of the American Topical Association, JAPOS, devoted to the topic—the acronym is Journalists, Authors, and Poets On Stamps. I joined, and went through catalogs, and began acquiring stamps.
And never really got caught up in it. For one thing, the stamps themselves did not strike me an inherently interesting. They were mostly portrait stamps, and they mostly depicted writers I’d never heard of, and found I had precious little interest in learning more about. And I didn’t want to design album pages, and couldn’t get much satisfaction out of housing my new acquisitions in a stockbook.
Beyond that, I came to realize that I lacked the mindset of a topical collector. I can certainly appreciate topical collecting and have no end of respect for its enthusiasts. Indeed, topical displays are often the ones I find most interesting at shows. But it was becoming clear to me that I was programmed to collect stamps on the basis of where they were from, not what they pictured.
So I began collecting the stamps of Ireland. I had long been fond of the country, knew a fair amount of its history, and liked the restraint the Irish had shown in their stamp-issuing policy over the years. (Two of my Vanity Fair prints turned up on a pair of stamps issued in 1980 to honor Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.) I sought out mint never-hinged stamps, housed them in a pair of Davo hingeless albums, and reached a point where there was nothing left for me to buy. I could still keep up with new issues, and buy annual album supplements to house them, but that felt like renewing a subscription to a magazine I never read.
Or I could specialize, seeking out minor varieties and errors, adding blocks and other multiples, picking up covers, working my way into postal history. I did pick up some forerunner issues, and quite a few booklets. But I found I didn’t care about die breaks, or any of the minutiae you couldn’t see without a magnifying glass. And I couldn’t work up much interest in covers or postal history. In fact, now that my collection was essentially complete, I found myself not much inclined to open the albums. I was glad I had them, and it pleased me to see them on the shelf, but there they stood, untouched.
Which meant I ought to start another collection. But of what? British Empire? A good possibility, as I’d always liked their stamps. Benelux? Again, I knew the stamps, and liked them well enough.
But I liked most countries’ stamps, really, and to select one area for specialization was to neglect the rest of the world.
But I couldn’t set out to collect the whole world, could I?
Well, why not?
It
was one thing to collect worldwide. It was another thing to collect
everything—and I knew better than to attempt that. I’d already
discovered with my Irish collection that I wasn’t geared for
keeping up with new issues, and was more interested in earlier
stamps. 1940 struck me as a good cut-off date. It wasn’t until
after that date—after World War Two, really—that countries went
nuts on a grand scale, issuing stamps in enormous profusion. And the
earlier engraved stamps appealed more to me aesthetically than the
more flamboyant stamps facilitated by modern printing advances.
So I’d collect the stamps of philately’s first century. That would keep me busy enough.
And I knew not to include the United States in my philatelic world. I’d collected U.S. issues avidly as a child, and it seems to me that most of my knowledge of my country’s history was an unwitting by-product of my collecting. Like Keller, the stamp-collecting hit man I’ve written a few books about, I can still name the presidents in order. (So he told his associate, Dot. “In order to what?” was her perfectly reasonable response.)
But I’d be spreading my resources too thin if I tried to collect the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Once I’d made my decision, I wasn’t sure what to do next. And then I saw a listing for a worldwide collection, 1840 to 1900, and the $1000 price seemed reasonable. The next thing I knew, I was the owner of an old Scott brown album containing a collection that had been put together eighty or more years before it came into my hands.
The dealer who’d sold it to me had done some cherry-picking first. I remember that there were no stamps on the pages for French Offices in China, but hinge marks to show they’d once been present. Iceland, too, was empty, and who knows what individual rarities may once have been present. It looked at first as though I had a truly valuable run of several Central American countries, until I discovered that the stamps were all Seebeck reprints. Most of the European issues were used, and condition throughout was what dealers call mixed.
No matter. There was plenty of value there, and, more to the point, it got me started.
First
thing I did, once I’d familiarized myself with what I had, was
start buying stamps to add to it. I found some dealers who sent out
weekly lists, and a couple who sent out approvals, and I even found
one fellow who ran a cubbyhole shop weekends in a nearby antique
mall. It didn’t take me long, though, before I became dissatisfied
with that old album, and realized that what I wanted to house my new
collection was the Brown Album reprint I saw advertised in Linn’s.
I bought a set of pages and binders and set about remounting my
collection.
And that turned out to be the best thing I could have done. It took months, and by the time I was through I was truly acquainted with the stamps in my collection. Before long I had bought more pages through 1940 and binders to accommodate them.
There was a point, after I’d finally gotten around to assembling all the albums with all the new pages, that what I had was a handful of pages with stamps on them floating like islands in a virtual sea of blank pages. But the blank pages didn’t bother me, and it was satisfying every time one of them got a stamp mounted on it. There are fewer blank pages in those albums now, but there are still some to be found, and they still don’t bother me. And I still find it satisfying every time I get to mount a stamp or two on one of them.
The Miracle of Empty Spaces
After I bought that first old Scott album (worldwide, 1840-1900), my wife asked a perfectly reasonable question. What would I do, she wanted to know, when I’d filled every one of its spaces?
“Should I live another three hundred years,” I told her, “and should I become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice—two eventualities which strike me as equally possible—I would still be unable to fill this book.”
“Well, that’s a load off my mind,” she said. “I was worried you’d be hanging around the house with nothing to do.”
Different collectors, I’ve come to realize, regard empty spaces differently. An empty space provides graphic evidence that one’s holding of a particular group of stamps is not complete, that one’s work remains unfinished.
And certain spaces guarantee that the work will be forever unfinished. For example, my own album has room for Sweden 1a, the unique three-skilling error of color. Even if the stamp’s current owner should decide to sell, the likelihood of my being able to buy it is, uh, remote. And the Swedish stamp is hardly unique in its uniquity; my albums have room for any number of stamps of which only a single copy exists, stamps unknown outside permanent institutional collections, stamps that, should I exceed Croesus in wealth and Methuselah in length of days, will still never be mine.
Indeed, even if I could wrap myself in a cloak of invisibility and pilfer all those rarities from all those royal collections, I’d still have empty spaces to look at. Because my Brown albums are reproductions of early albums, and some of the stamps included are ones that never existed in the first place.
Some collectors prefer to design and produce their own pages, an endeavor that has become a good deal simpler in the era of desktop publishing. There are many satisfactions in so doing—one can arrange the stamps to please one’s eye, or one’s sense of order—but not the least consideration is that the collector can limit the spaces to ones he can reasonably expect to fill. (Or wants to fill—if you find certain minor varieties and shades to your taste, make space for them; if not, include them out.)
If
the permanently unfillable space can be daunting, it at least teaches
the valuable lesson of acceptance. But what about the space that
ought to be easy to fill, but somehow remains forever empty? Now
that’s
infuriating.
When I was a boy with the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania, I had no end of empty spaces, and most of them were ones I never expected to fill. But among my holdings were three of the four stamps of the 1935 Silver Jubilee issue for Fiji. Somehow I’d managed to acquire all but the lowest value, the 1-1/2 penny carmine and blue. Nowadays it catalogs $1.10, but this was long ago, and it was valued at whatever Scott’s minimum may have been back then, or close to it. I’m sure I could have filled that space for a dime—if I could have found the damn thing offered for sale.
I had no end of opportunities to buy the whole set, and inexpensively enough, but why buy three stamps I already owned in order to get the one really cheap one that I lacked? I figured it would turn up offered as a single if I just waited long enough, and I waited for years, and when I finally sold that collection in my mid-thirties, that particular space remained empty.
Twenty or more years later, when I resumed collecting, I still remembered that stamp. I even remembered the catalog number, Scott #110. Amazing isn’t it, the kind of clutter that lodges in the corner of one’s mind?
I haven’t bought any partial Silver Jubilee sets lately, and I have the Fiji set intact. But I didn’t have to look it up just now in order to include the catalog number here. That empty space stayed with me better than most of the filled ones.
In the main, I learned the lesson of Fiji #110—don’t buy partial sets. But this principle is one I sometimes honor in the breach. One dealer in particular often lists partial sets at extremely attractive prices, and now and then I bite. And it seems to me the frustration of the blank space, so much greater when what’s missing is one of a set, is more than offset on the happy occasion when I’m able to fill it in.
Philately
is by no means my only obsession, and I have a number of other
pursuits with their own blank spaces. My wife and I are ardent
travelers, for example, and some years ago visited out hundredth
country and thus qualified for membership in the Travelers Century
Club. There were, when last I looked, 321 countries on the club’s
list, and our own total now stands somewhere between 135 and 140, so
we have a long way to go. We’ll add several on a Cape
Town-to-Gibraltar cruise of West Africa in the spring, but we’re in
no great rush to complete our set, and there are a couple of spots on
the globe we’re as likely to reach as I am to get hold of Sweden
1a. And that’s okay.