Stamps and Covers from my (Budding) Collection

NATO 10th Anniversary Cover, Fleetwood Catchet, Washington D.C., April 1, 1959.

I’m an eager amateur in most of my hobbies, but I’m a complete newcomer to the colorful and unfamiliar world of stamp collecting. It all started with a spontaneous visit to the regional stamp expo last year. I took my three-year-old son at the time. Both of us got a taste of how serious, fascinating, and even overwhelming stamp collecting can be. I’m sure a lot went over our heads on that first outing, but it was fun enough for us to want to come back and learn more.

This year I brought my wife and two-year-old daughter along for the ride. We had a great time starting our budding stamp collection. A lot of the booth owners doted on the two younger ones, which made sense—they were the youngest ones there by two generations.

All of us enjoyed seeing the framed displays of covers (the outside of an envelope or package usually including postage stamps) & stamps themselves with accompanying annotations.

Some of them were very detailed and unique. One letter, for example, had been rescued from a mailbag saved from a fiery Zeppelin crash in the early twentieth century; another display showed a batch of letters exchanged by Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a unit comprised of the fighting sons of many unjustly incarcerated Japanese Americans during the Second World War. The 442nd was doubly unique for having earned the distinction of becoming the most decorated unit in American history, having fought valiantly through two bloody campaigns in Italy and northwest Europe.

I appreciated the care with which the owners of each collection staged and curated these artifacts—some worth thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars. Each told a fascinating story, offering a glimpse into a particular corner of the world at a specific point in time. I loved the way the hobby blended art, culture, geography, storytelling, history, and technology, revealing the values and character of a given society in a visceral, engaging way.

They say the best way to get into stamp collecting is first to determine what type of stamps you want to collect. Newcomers usually start with a theme in mind—countries, royalty, sports, holidays, a certain decade, commemorations, etc. As we meandered around the expo, my kids gravitated towards colorful stamps with animated characters, vehicles, animals, flowers, and the like. Soon, my wife and I started to wonder what we wanted to collect.

In some ways I’m still not sure. I created this page as a digital album of sorts, a place to post pictures of some of my favorite finds as I learn more about philately. You can probably sense of the types of stamps I’m interested in. In the future, I may delve deeper into the history of the various stamps and covers I come across. For now, here’s a snapshot of some of my favorites in an admittedly small collection.

Some of my favorites so far. A version of the "Grand Union" flag of 1776 would actually make a great cover image if I ever turn my dissertation into a book.

Cold War-era stamps. NATO and Eisenhower are the standouts here--two types of stamps I'm very interested in collecting.

These flags are part of a collection of the liberated countries of World War II. I have an entire page showing the complete collection, but I'll just throw these on here as a nice representative sample, along with stamps from Japan and Greece to add to the international flavor.

This one was pretty special to me. I purchased this at the 2024 Stamp Expo in Portland, Oregon a few days after defending my Ph.D. dissertation. I'd spent a fair amount of time (three chapters, in fact!) writing about the Tunisian campaign, and stumbled on this collection of Tunisian stamps from 1953 showing all the Allied flags arrayed over Tunis. It was a symbolic find. I love the five different colors.

I mostly like this one for the colorful rainbow trout. I was catching a lot of them at one of our local stocked lakes when I got this, so it was fitting. The three other animals were a nice bonus.