Why do I call myself the reluctant philatelist? It's a long story, but I'll do an abridged version here. Stamps and postal history have always been in the background somewhere in my life. For decades. But only in the past year has it realized into an intellectual and professional interest.
As a child, I was given some sort of starter album and stamps. I distinctly remember my father attempting to show me how to hinge the stamps onto the pages. The attention to detail bored me. I had no patience to sort, match, and hinge all those stamps. (Although I did like how they looked - all the various countries and images were wonderful) My starter album was soon abandoned and discarded.
Over the years, connections to philately came and went. Working in libraries, I saw many wonderful stamps on letters and packages. I corresponded with friends as they went on adventures in France, Northern Ireland, Mali, and Mongolia. I saved their letters sent in airmail envelopes with colorful stamps, but eventually, they too were discarded.
Enter my husband, an ardent stamp collector. He would attempt to seduce me into the hobby. I resisted. There wasn't any real reason why. I enjoyed geography and maps, history, as well as art and design. All of these things are prominent in philately. By that time, I even had more than a passing interest in postcards (deltiology!) and avidly collected ones with maps on them.
I even had, if I were honest, a small philatelic collection myself: a Mary Lyon (Scott's 2169) stamp, a block of Elvis (Scott's 2721), and the complete sheet of the Greetings from America stamps (Scott's pane of 50, #3561-3610). I began to assist his collecting, bringing home from work envelopes and package wrappings with overseas stamps, and I was just as excited as he was when he came across a large box of stamps and 19th-century letters in our apartment building's recycling room.
Enter in a change of jobs, another cross-country move, and the pandemic. Like many others, I worked from home during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the philatelic world moved from in-person to virtual like everything else. Tired of the offerings on Netflix and Prime, my husband started to watch "Stamp chats" sponsored by the American Philatelic Society, listened to (and watched) Conversations with Philatelists, and discovered the YouTube channel Explorings Stamps.
It was Graham Beck's Exploring Stamps videos that sealed my fate. I found the topics fascinating. The first one I saw was "Collecting Perfins." Beck combined the physical artifact with its history and connected it to the larger global context. I was hooked.
