Social Philately

All museums and all collecting hobbies started out by removing things from their context. I can’t think of an exception. This was very evident in early “cabinets of curiosities” which were no more than magpie hoards of this, that and the other. Likewise, the Vatican drawers, created for the purpose, were full of the detached relics of saints but contained no actual saints.

When stamps were introduced in 1840, it was the job of post office clerks to remove them from the sheets - which provided their initial context - so that they could be stuck onto envelopes. Early collectors promptly removed them from this context of use, the envelopes onto which they were stuck. Only later did collectors begin to show an interest in sheets (to which were later added booklets and coils) and an interest in covers, out of which has developed the hobby of postal history collecting.

What is now called “Social philately” is simply an expansion of the context into which collectors place their stamps or covers and it has been greatly enabled by the ability we all now have to google something, to find out who wrote a card, who was the addressee, what a town was like one hundred years ago, and so on. Likewise, serious stamp collectors have long been interested in stamp printers, the machinery they used, the inks they sourced, the ways in which they marketed their services, the scams in which they were involved.

 In these ways, stamps and covers are placed in an ever enlarged context of social and economic relations. But “Social philately” is really a matter of degree rather than of type. Anyone who ever googles to find out who wrote or received a letter is engaged in social philately, even if it is not the main focus of their interest. On this Blog, see this post as an example of what might be involved:

https://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2014/08/brailov-podolia-brailiv-podilia-1918.html

The potential of  social philately is well-illustrated by the collection held by Boston University where Professor Thomas Glick amassed several thousand stationery cards from the archives of a pre - 1914 Romanian grain dealer. The cards allowed the way in which business was done to be reconstructed from the written texts on the cards and the places from which they were despatched. They also show a business being conducted in two languages, Romanian and Yiddish. 

See 

http://www.thomasfglick.com/shtetlproject.html

Many other correspondences exist which were originally in commercial, family or state archives and which allow similar reconstruction projects to be undertaken, though often the archives are quickly dispersed before anyone has the chance to buy them up intact. Similarly, printers’ archives have been broken up and individual items often command prices which make any thought of reconstructing the whole archive unrealistic. But it is entirely possible to reconstruct from a limited set of examples how, for example,  a nineteenth century stamp printer worked.

Postal History and Social Philately: Russian Possibilities

Postal History involves looking at

Who sent
What to
Whom
By what Means (How)
At what Cost (Tariffs)
and at what Risk (Loss, Censorship, etc)
And Why?

What makes this History is that it is looked at over time. But the interest in Who, What and Whom is also an interest that might be called Social Philately.

Consider an easy example. You could study, for Imperial Russia, Who sent Visiting Cards and to Whom and Why. You would learn about social class, about etiquette, and so on. Along the way, you might look at who produced visiting cards, and how much they cost, and you might notice that there were even postal stationery envelopes produced for them (some of them privately ordered).

More obviously connected to postal history, you would soon notice that special reduced tariffs were available - for much of the Imperial period, this can be summarised by saying 1 kopeck for local sendings; 2 kopecks for anywhere in the Empire (including from Levant or China post offices); 3 kopecks for abroad. This is maybe a bit surprising; after all, you will have already realised that the people who send visiting cards are people who can (easily) afford to send them. They don't really need reduced tariffs. Nor do visiting cards obviously benefit Trade and Industry, unlike commercial printed matter.

So this could be an interesting collection with lots of scope for setting it in context. And you will be able to explain why you don't find Visiting Cards being sent after 1917...

I just finished reading Orlando Figes, Just Send Me Word (2012). This is based on a 1246 letter correspondence between Lev Mischenko in the Gulag at Pechora in the Komi ASSR 1946 - 54 and Svetlana Ivanov in Moscow. The letters are now held by Memorial in Moscow. Lev Mischenko published part of his autobiography before his death: Poka ia pomniu (Moscow 2006).

To make a serious collection of Gulag correspondence would not be easy. Letters to or from prisoners are not common. Letters to or from the central and local branches of the Camp administration (the MVD) also seem to be uncommon. I have only handled a few examples of Gulag-related material in recent years. Maybe much more material exists in Russia. Maybe much of it passes unnoticed in dealers' boxes - it rarely looks very interesting.

There is also the fact to be taken into account, and which Figes discusses in his book, that prisoners often tried to get their letters sent for them outside the Camp so that they were able to avoid censorship. This involved bribing guards or finding free workers willing to help. Likewise, if prisoners could find an address outside the Camp to which their families could write - the final stage of the delivery then being undertaken privately - then they too could write more freely. These "outside" addresses are like the "undercover addresses" in Neutral countries, which during the second World War allowed people to correspond with relatives living in enemy territory.


Visiting Cards and Gulag letters are two completely different worlds, and not the easiest. In contrast, Prisoner of War correspondence is an "easy" field in which to do interesting postal history - especially for World War One, it is freely available and cheap. Correspondence to or from Arctic and Antarctic stations is another "doable" field. But, really, the list is as long as you like to make it. At the moment, I am looking at Parcel Cards from the 1917 - 1921 period - and I am interested in buying more.