Stamp Collecting - A Link To One's Childhood

Reporter Julie Carpenter of Britain's Sunday and Daily Express writes, "A taste for stamp collecting is something to be confided quietly not sung from the rooftops."

She goes on to pen, "according to experts at Stanley Gibbons, the world’s biggest dealers, it doesn’t have to be this way. The hobby is on the increase and, internationally, there is a veritable boom. Stamps are the third most traded commodity on eBay and prices are going sky high. In the UK the reason for this is partly because the baby boom generation, who took up ­philately at school, are returning to the hobby in their retirement."

According to Julie, “These are people with disposable incomes who also often have an emotional connection to stamp ­collecting because their fathers used to travel and they would send back letters or postcards. So while their fathers may no longer be alive, the hobby is a way to link back to them and to their childhood.”

Writer Simon ­Garfield, author of The Error World: An Affair With Stamps, is quoted in the article and says he, like many collectors, started at school. “This was the Sixties and there wasn’t much else to do. There weren’t computers or video games, just the weekly trip to the cinema, reading or playing football. Stamp collecting was encouraged because it was safe and reason­ably intellectual."

Garfield points out that many people are taking up the hobby again as a way to “recapture one’s lost youth” but explains that much of the appeal lies in “the thrill of the quest, the desire to hunt down that really rare stamp that you read about when you were at school and there’s almost the feeling that when you’ve got it you’re not so interested any more and you move on to the next one”.

To read the entire article, click here.