Memories: Childhood Stamp Collecting

The end of the year has always been the time of the year when I end up "taking inventory" of life, and where I am, and what I hope to do in the year ahead. I don't really do formal "New Year's resolutions" as I have a nasty habit of never making these goals.

One of the common Danish stamps from my childhood. It is even
(faintly) postmarked RUNGSTED KYST where we lived.

Putting away the Christmas decorations brought up some childhood memories, reminding me of my beginnings as a stamps collector. My parents had traveled extensively before they returned to Denmark to start a family, and they had made friends all over the world. And part of "keeping in touch" with this global group of friends involved the annual ritual sending of Christmas cards.

As a result, December was the time of the year when lots of mail would arrive from all over the world, in envelopes carrying stamps from many exotic places. And I got to keep all the stamps from the Christmas cards, which was very exciting.

Meanwhile, my dad would also bring home large numbers of stamps from the office. His company traded extensively with other companies and clients all over the globe, and there was usually an extra load of mail during December. That mail was particularly interesting because some companies and people would send gifts of various kinds, and those gifts would arrive in boxes actually franked with postage stamps from their countries of origin. This was the mid- to late 1960s, so stamps were still widely used on parcels. I didn't have a real concept of "high values" as a 7-year old-- I was just aware that the stamps were significantly "different" from the ones my dad brought home during the rest of the year

The 8 øre stamp from the 1875 "Bicolour" set was one of
the first "really old" stamps in my childhood collection.

Although I don't remember the exact way I "got started," I do remember my first stamp "album," which was a 16-page stock book with "picture cover" that was a collage of stamps from around the world. In fact, I still have it somewhere. I also remember getting old newspapers and "pressing" stamps in our phone books after soaking them off paper. I was impatient, so sometimes a stamp had to be soaked 2-3 times before it finally let go of all the glue and no longer stuck itself back to the newspaper.

Stamp collecting was pretty simple back then. My friends and I simply collected "stamps." That said, it was not long before we discovered that most of our stamps were from Denmark-- since that's where we lived-- so "collecting Denmark" seemed to make more sense than "collecting the whole world."

I remember buying my second stock book with my own lawn mowing money, because I wanted my Danish stamps to be in a book by themselves. I'd heard that that was what "serious" collectors did, and I wanted people to see that I was "serious" about stamps.

Stamp collecting-- back then-- was also a pretty common hobby for kids (and adults), although it seems that in my native Denmark there were far more stamp collectors than anywhere else I have lived, subsequently. At least 7-8 people in my grade school class of some 25 had stamp collections, and to the best of my knowledge, at least half of them went on to be collectors, as adults. There were also several stamp collectors in my extended family, and nobody thought that "collecting stamps" was even the slightest bit "odd," as something to do. It wasn't until I moved to Texas as a 20-year old to go to college that I first ran into people who'd look at me "strangely" and say things like "How weird. I thought that was just something cranky old retired guys do."

The fact that being a stamp collector has sometimes gotten me perceived as a bit of a "strange nerd" has never put me off the hobby... and now that I have been collecting for over 45 years, I still actively promote philately as something interesting to do, in your spare time.

Memories: Finding Direction for my Collections

My father started me on stamp collecting, when I was maybe six years old and we were living in Denmark, where I was born and grew up. His original "purpose" in doing so was to teach me geography and world culture, through the images on stamps.

France Scott 1174, from 1967

For 3-4 years, my stamp collecting was strongly "guided" by my dad-- who pretty much told me "what" and "how" to collect. His interests were France, tropical islands and art... and that was reflected in the way he firmly guided me towards French stamps (and France was issuing quite a few large sized "art on stamps" at the time), as well as French dependencies like French Polynesia.

Of course, the only sources of these stamps were the incoming office mail at my dad's office, and going to a stamp dealer.

Meanwhile, lots of stamps from Denmark-- and neighboring Sweden-- poured in on envelopes in the daily mail. Naturally, I'd clip those and also get the ones that came from my dad's office.

However, my dad didn't really encourage me to collect Danish (or Swedish) stamps. In his opinion, they were "dull" and "ugly" and not worthy of collecting. At the same time, he was also dead set against my desire to collect stamps from Poland-- which I thought were very interesting and had lots of colorful pictures of animals and art.

"Nonsense!" said my dad, "those are 'gimmick stamps' created purely to take advantage of stamp collectors!" He was-- at least partially-- right, of course.

At the tender age of ten, I had amassed a pretty large hoard of Danish and Swedish stamps-- and most of my junior philatelist friends collected Denmark and Sweden. I was the only one who "collected" French art stamps, to be sure.

To this day, I remember the specific Danish stamp that led to my officially becoming a "Denmark collector" and to my father ending most of his interest in my stamp collecting endeavors.

Denmark AFA 485, from 1969

I was clipping the stamps from a stack of envelopes my dad had brought home from the office, when he passed and commented "I don't know why you even bother with that ugly junk. You can't even tell what it is!"

He was referring the to pictured 80 øre stamp from Denmark, issued in 1969. It was very common, at the time, as postage for oversized envelopes.

I don't remember the details of the rest of the conversation, just that I ended up telling my dad that I was "more interested in Danish stamps" than in "his" French ones. And with those words, I officially became a collector of Danish stamps-- even though I had already been "saving them" for four years.

Many years later, I came to understand that my dad's views on stamp collection-- and specifically on the issue of "French vs. Danish stamps" had little to do with stamp collecting, and a lot to do with the fact that he loved "all things French," while finding his native Danish culture small, narrow-minded and insular.

I still have my original collection of French stamps, started with my dad in a red "Abria" album. From time to time I pull out the album, and invariably find my way to the pages with the stamps issued between 1963 and 1970-- the period I have the strongest memory of. Now and then I do come across a French stamp I don't have in the collection (I stopped getting new pages in 1980) and add it to the appropriate space for it.

My Denmark collection, on the other hand, is large and varied and specialized and thriving... and has actually grown into a number of specialized "sub collections." Even though I haven't actually lived in Denmark since 1981, I never lost interest in collecting Danish stamps.