October 24, 2007--"A Little Crazy"

I used to collect stamps. At first, on those rare occasions when a letter would arrive from a relative in Canada or England or Israel, though I didn’t much care about what the letter contained (usually a request for money to buy a refrigerator) I steamed off the stamp and sequestered it in my album. Later, I discovered that you could buy foreign stamps by ordering them from companies that advertised by placing ads in the back of Superman comics. Then I found out about the world of big-time stamp collecting. It even had a fancy Latin-sounding name—Philately. Gimbels department store, Macy’s across-the-street rival (“Would Macys tell Gimbels?” was a famous tag line back then), on the first floor no less had a Philately Department where rare stamps in good condition sold for hundreds of dollars. This really impressed me and sent me back home to look more carefully at my skimpy collection to see if maybe, just maybe I had a stamp worth perhaps $20. And then as I lost whatever was left of my adolescent innocence (not much) I read in the New York Times about a stamp from I think New Guinea that was one of a kind and thus the rarest and most valuable stamp ever—worth hundreds of thousands. I think that the great and wealthy hockey star Wayne Gretsky bought it a few years ago for millions. So stamps, in addition to teaching you a little about world geography, could also be a good investment. No surprise then to learn yesterday about the sale at auction of a strip of three 1923 Warren Harding stamps for $172,000. (See NY Times article linked below.) What was so rare about these stamps considering that million of them were printed? Not their condition since there are tens of thousands in perfect shape. What made these special, and valuable, is the number of holes or perforations across the upper and lower edges. You know, before we had self-adhesive stamps that we just peel off a glossy paper strip, stamps that required us to lick them came in sheets of 100; and to use one we had to detach it from the sheet. This was made easy by tearing along the perforations. But in the printing of the Harding stamps, some came out of the press with 10 holes across the top and others, many, many fewer, emerged with eleven. These are the rare and valuable ones, especially if you have a strip of three or more and, of course, if they are in good condition. Mint condition being the best. There is one Lawrence Cohen of Plymouth, N.H. who has devoted all his collecting energies to these 2 cent stamps. In the 1980s he acquired several shoe boxes that contained about 150,000 of them and then spent, by his own admission, thousands of hours over ten years searching for perforation variations until, eureka, he found a well-preserved three-stamp strip with the sought-for 11-hole perforation. The rest is history. After paying his seller’s fee to the auctioneer, he is likely pocketing a sum of money that is closely equivalent to what he would have earned if he had had a part-time job that paid minimum wage. But what would you prefer—flipping burgers at McDonald’s or bent over a table with a magnifying glass while going blind counting perforations? His wife, I think, had it right. She said, to do this, he had to be “a little crazy.”