Sunday, October 31, 2010

A Young Man on His Way Up in Philately

The Mt. Vernon, Virginia, Register-News reports, "Ryan Wellmaker was recently named a Senior Fellow with the Youth Philatelic Leaders Fellowship Class of 2011 at the American Philatelic StampShow held in Richmond, Va. Wellmaker, a sophomore at Tulane University in New Orleans, said collecting stamps has been a hobby of his since he was a young teen."

Ryan is quoted in the piece by Kandace McCoy as saying,“I really go for the good stuff. I have a concept that junk stays junk and I look at (stamps) as investment pieces. Stamps are most valuable for their weight and size. For example, you could have a thing of gold, but you would have to have so much to amount to those millions of dollars (like stamps bring). What makes them expensive is the scarcity. They don’t produce them from the 1840s anymore. Primarily I collect England pre-Victorian. Great Britain was the first country to issue stamps on paper and it started with the penny blacks.”

Kandace goes on to say, "This is Wellmaker’s first year as a Senior Fellow, which will be a two-year term he intends to utilize to encourage other youth to get involved with stamp collecting — or philately. He said numbers are decreasing in the hobby, because many of the older generation who began collecting as children are now passing away."

To read the entire article, click here.
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posted by Don Schilling at 12:01 AM