Recently, I attended a
provincial auction which specialises in putting into boxes the collections of
dead collectors and offering them at a low price, leaving it to those who look
through the box to work out its value to them. If the auction house sells a box
for fifty or a hundred pounds then that’s a good enough result.
Many of these boxes do
not contain collections in the usual sense; they are hoards accumulated often
over many years with no system, no attempt at conservation, and so on. Most are
almost worthless.
Every day since that
day in May 1840 when the Penny Black went on sale, the world supply of mint and
used postage stamps (and covers and cards - but I will use “postage stamps” as a
general term) which are potentially available to collectors has increased EVERY
DAY. Wars, floods, fires, and despatch to the municipal rubbish dump have never
done much to slow the growth in supply. Even now, with so much mail being sent electronically,
there are around 200 postal administrations in the world producing stamps and
selling them every day, though a significant proportion of those
administrations do not expect more than a tiny percentage to be used for
sending mail. What percentage of stamps
issued by Pitcairn Island get to be postally used?
There may have been a
time when there were enough dealers and collectors to handle the quantity of
material available and the daily additions to it. That is no longer true and
may have ceased to be true well before 1900. There is now a very, very large
inventory of stamps which are not being collected in the ordinary sense, just moved in bulk from one
temporary holder to the next. Think of old bundleware which was tied with cotton thread into bundles maybe one hundred years ago and which comes to auction still unopened.
These stamps are a bit
like the water in bottled water. The water costs nothing; the bottling, the
transport and the selling costs money. Buy in sufficient bulk and the cost to
you of a stamp drops to some tiny fraction of a cent - maybe there is a world record;
maybe someone somewhere has already bought 5 000 000 stamps for something like
0.000001 per stamp.
In my view, all this creates
the possibility for a very interesting hobby which I will call Salvage Philately. Salvage philately is
about going through these vast inventories and picking out things worth having
- rare classic stamps in really, really bad condition but which will look a bit
better if they are washed; very unpleasant looking covers from which a stamp worth
having can be soaked off; pre 1914 multiples of MNH ** stamps which have
somehow survived in dead stocks and which can be used to upgrade spaces in old
printed albums; occasional postmark interest stamps which have never been
noticed.
Traditionally, all this has been called Things To Do on a winter evening. But salvage philately is really
a hobby in its own right.
