I used to collect stamps when I was quite young but had to sell my collection when I ran away from No. 1. I lost heart after that, desultorily throwing interesting stamps (on envelopes) into a box. (I now have several boxes.) Yesterday I was at Grannie's and saw a basketful of covers marked eight bucks. What the hell, I liked the basket anyway and bought it. Kim said, "Oh, I've got some old albums as well." There was a box with four albums in it, the top two quite moldy. Eight bucks. What the hell, again, I bought those too. One of the albums was empty, two contained fairly mundane stuff from the first half of the last century, mostly forties and fifties. I don't know if any of those stamps are valuable but it's really fascinating to look at stamps from countries that no longer exist. Nyasaland, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), even Palestine. I love the German stamps printed during their runaway inflation with denominations in the millions! But the last album got my attention. It contains a number of covers, the earliest being a "postal card" postmarked 1905, something to do with buying some land in NC. The second item of interest is a "post-card" from 1919, printed with the words "On active duty with the American Expeditionary Forces in France," and it's signed by a feller named Koontz who, apparently, was CoC of something or other, will have to find the magnifying glass to read it. He talks about Nice, which he says looks like Savannah (I think, hard to read the writing), and says it has huge orange groves and lovely flowers. He adds he was in Italy the day before.

It would be wonderful if they're worth something. There are several places in Durham I can take them to check but there are so many crooks here, I thought I'd hold off until I move to CHarleston. (A better class of crook, lol!) Anyway, if anyone knows anything about this sort of stuff, please let me know what you think.

I intend to get hold of a catalogue to see what the stamps and covers are worth (mostly franked, far as I can see, so on the low end of the scale). It will be quite a project, sorting the stamps according to country and date. Even if they're not worth anything, they're valuable to me for their dense history--I mean there are a few stamps with Queen Victoria on them! (Yeah, I know, but they're relatively common, as I remember--except for the penny black and a version of the penny red, which are not in evidence!--and they're all franked and not in mint condition.) And there's a map of the world where a great deal of the countries are colored pink. This is legendary--it means they're British and is from the days when "the sun never sets on the British Empire." Really interesting stuff.

-- Anonymous, December 20, 2002

Answers

too much like work for me. :)

here's a link for ya, though:

Link

http://shop.usps.com/cgi-bin/vsbv/postal_store_non_ssl/customer_care/contentUpload.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&location=/html/resources.html

This link lists the following:

Organizations
Philatelic Centers
Museums, libraries, and displays
Free periodicals
Literature
Foreign Postal Administrations


-- Anonymous, December 20, 2002

Drat. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do the work.

-- Anonymous, December 20, 2002

Old Git, what a wonderful find! To be able to read them and hold something that old in your hands with such history is fantastic!

-- Anonymous, December 20, 2002

you never know, they could be worth $$$ I was reading along, I was hopeing you were going to say they were YOUR collections that you had to leave behind!!

that would have really been neat!

-- Anonymous, December 20, 2002

To be able to read them and hold something that old in your hands with such history is fantastic!

It isn't often that someone considers holding something old in their hands 'fantastic.' ha ha ha ha ha

I guess it depends on what it is...

-- Anonymous, December 21, 2002

Carl!!! Is that you, using Barefoot's handle???

-- Anonymous, December 21, 2002

Barefoot, I deleted several things that I wrote. :^)

-- Anonymous, December 22, 2002

ah yes, some things must be handled delicately.

-- Anonymous, December 22, 2002