A Stamp Dealer Reflects on the Allure of Older Stamps

All of those wonderful stamps issued before 1950... this era not only provides stamp collectors with more than a century of material to choose from but a reminder that many of the world’s stamp issuing nations come and go. For every Angra there seems to be an Anguilla.

The years immediately following WWII are notable for the immediate return to the release of omnibus issues by British and French colonies, a flurry of releases to commemorate President Roosevelt, and a return to normalcy in Europe. Austria’s scenic definitives promptly appeared in 1945. An interesting foreshadowing of the intriguing role Vienna was to play as a link between East and West in the ensuing cold war years appears with an overprinted definitive in 1946 which commemorates a meeting of Austria’s Society for Cultural and Economic Relations with the USSR.

Stamps such as this may help to explain our fascination with older stamps. It’s not simply that they are old, but that they involve us in all sorts of perspectives of the time.

To consider the stamp’s function, not only as a postal instrument but as a political tool, is to savor the joy of collecting. And older stamps seem particularly good at providing these joys. It’s not hard to figure out what was going on in Bulgaria in 1945 when we look at stamps with overprints urging Bulgarians to “Collect Old Iron,” “Collect Discarded Paper,” and to “Collect All Kinds of Rags.”

The emotions of a country, particularly those of grief, often find themselves expressed on a stamp. To honor the death of a leader or a beloved figure following his or her death has been part of stamp collecting for more than a century. And other nations getting into the act of extending this honor, as we have seen unfold with the release of Princess Diana stamps, is a part of this tradition.

But this honor is not the exclusive domain of royalty. A massive outpouring of grief swept across Lithuania in the mid thirties following the death of two aviators, Captains Steponas Darius and Stasys Girenas on a flight from New York to Kaunas. The allegory brought into play into a commemorative set is high drama, featuring a dark angel of death and white knight.

Obviously, most Lithuanians in 1933 were much more interested paying tribute to their aviators than in paying attention to new political leadership in nearby Germany. And obviously the tragedy provided Lithuania with an opportunity to help quench the thirst of collectors of the day for airmail stamps with a topical subject matter.

The ability of an older stamp to lure us back to its place in time is one of the reasons so many of us are convinced no other hobby offers quite the fascination of stamp collecting.

And then, there's the matter of how we define "old" and what our cutoff date is. For every collector who draws some kind of a line at 1960, there's another collector whose line is drawn at 1860.

And each can enjoy stamp collecting in equal doses.