Cover Girl

First a quick Superbowl Shout Out: Congratulations to John Elway, Peyton Manning and my adopted home team of the Denver Broncos on their victory over the New England Patriots on Sunday.  Yeah!  I wore orange all last Sunday.  (It’s the Broncos color- and Hermès, too.  No wonder I love it.)

And it’s just been announced that the Lyric Opera’s Renee Fleming will sing the National Anthem.  First time ever an opera star has done the honors.

What can I say? The Broncos, opera and the color orange.  This is going to be MY Superbowl!

And now on to today’s business at hand…

Stamp collecting.

Stamps fascinate me.  And I can pinpoint the exact moment I was bitten by the philately bug.  1964.  Right after I saw the movie Charade.

Spoiler Alert DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN THE MOVIE: I remember telling my older cousin Stuart that I was about to see Charade that upcoming weekend.  He said. “It’s good. The money’s in the stamps.”

I had no idea that he just revealed the major focus of the entire plot.  It did kill the suspense for me but no matter.  There was still my idol, Audrey Hepburn- and her chic Givenchy wardrobe- to drool over.

And guess what, fashion people?  The clothes have really held up.  Fifty years later and I still would be thrilled to wear each and every robe, complete, hat and ski outfit seen in this movie.  Mes félicitations, Monsieur le Comte.

And fifty years later, I’m also captivated and intrigued by stamps.  They’re small, beautiful pieces of history after all. The world in microcosm.

And, as Monsieur Felix- the stamp dealer in the movie- so rightly pointed out, they can be incredibly valuable and dangerous to own, too.

A fatal obsession.

I don’t know if any of you out there are collectors, but odds are one of you is- or knows someone who loves stamps.  Even though it’s not as popular a hobby as it once was.  At one time, it was estimated that worldwide over 200 million people collected stamps. Now it’s down to around 60 million or so.

Still, that’s an awful lot of people who are concerned with cachets, hingeless mounts, first day covers and commemoratives.

If all this is just gobbledygook to you, indulge me.  Let me give you a (very) brief lesson in Stamps 101.

The first postage stamp was the Penny Black issued in 1840.  This featured- who else?- a young Queen Victoria.  She went on to grace many more stamps during her long reign.

And some of them probably found their way into the hands of a Franco-Austrian nobleman, Phillipp Von Ferrary.  He acquired every famous and rare stamp issued by 1917 and his collection was considered the finest in the world.

Sadly- or perhaps fittingly- it was seized and sold by the French government after World War I as war reparations.  A miniature Treaty of Versailles, if you will.  With all its noble intentions- and harsh aftermath.

There have been other famous collectors, of course.  FDR and Freddie Mercury both loved stamps. And John Lennon’s collection is now the property of England’s National Postal Museum.

But perhaps the most comprehensive collection is that of Queen Victoria’s grandson, George V. (Who died today as I edit this, January 20, 1936 coincidentally enough.)

His Royal Highness was a famous, famous collector.  And his albums are now in the possession of his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II.  Who, I gather, leafs through them from time to time stifling a royal yawn.  She wasn’t bitten by the bug, you see.  Much more into horse racing like her mother- and corgis.

My brother, Kenny, knows just how Her Majesty feels.  Our mother was a stamp collector, and as kids we were quite familiar with her bound volumes and stock books whose clear pockets held the stamps she had not yet catalogued.  Her interest began with her father and she had kept his collection alive and well throughout our early years.

Kenny was not at all interested in continuing the family hobby.  He was much more excited by her numismatic tendencies.  Our mother collected coins, too.

For years and years she had patiently searched, squirreled away and then fitted coins into numerous blue books.  Now here was an interest Kenny could really get behind.

For just as patiently, he would search out her coin albums and pop the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters out of their holders…

And spend them all at Dairy Queen.

Little Kenny’s habit of feeding his cheeseburger and Mr. Misty habit at DQ with this precious spare change left my mother’s collection woefully threadbare.  Luckily for him, she didn’t check on these coin books very often.

But we always worried that one day we’d see the Dairy Queen owner driver past us in a Rolls Royce.  (Bought with his bank book-altering discovery of a rare Buffalo Head nickel, Mercury Head dime or Standing Liberty quarter.)

Kenny could not figure out how to transmute stamps into burgers so this collection was left intact.  (The only time we did use this rate of exchange was with S&H Green Stamps. Which we faithfully pasted in little books as soon as my mother returned from the National. We used a sponge I remember, but somehow I can still taste the glue.)

I too was bored by her passion for stamps until I saw Charade.  And then suddenly I caught on.  I was captured by their beauty and the romance of faraway places.  I saw how exotic and precious they were.  I understood their mystique and allure.

I even started collecting on a mini scale myself.  I bought stamps that caught my fancy. And I’m looking at some of them as I proofread.

I have some commemorating Elvis, Henry Mancini, Mary Cassatt, and my aforementioned heroine, Audrey Hepburn.  I have airmail stamps honoring World War I flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker, too.

I have stamps from Tahiti, England, Italy, France and Hong Kong- all locales that hold a special place in my heart.

And I have stamps with dogs, butterflies, roses and books on them.  Ditto.

No, I don’t own the rare and fabulous.  But my little collection means as much to me as the Three-Skilling Yellow means to its owner.

Well, almost.

That wraps it up for today.  If you have any good stamp lore and want to share it, please let me know.  I’m a very rank amateur but I’m most interested in learning anything I can about this delightful and beautiful pastime.

But now I’ve got to go out in this chilly weather.  Bills to mail, dontcha know.

And guess what?

I’m out of stamps.