Relaxing on the Trail

Tailored Woman catalog, pages 2-3 w/opera star Lina Cavaliere to the left.
Collection of Cheryl Ganz.

This week I picked the brain of Cheryl Ganz, the Curator of Philately at the National Postal Museum, about how to find stamp collectors who did not belong to organized clubs. She told me how difficult it is because very often those stamp collectors kept very common stamps in some unconventional ways–according to the philatelic world–and so often these collections were discarded. One interesting example is a women’s coat catalog from a department store in Iowa that was converted into a stamp album. Cheryl was offered this because it had no monetary value at an auction, but she jumped at it because of its historical value. She assumes this was a woman’s collection, because of the subject of the catalog and because of how the stamps were arranged. This person wasn’t a serious collector, and most serious collectors were men who would have arranged their stamps carefully according to rules followed in the philatelic community. Instead, our collector created patterns incorporating the colors of stamps. I’ve come across some condescending articles written by “serious philatelists” deriding this type of arranging of stamps “typical” of female collectors. Egads! I’m grateful to Cheryl for sharing this with me, because it maybe one of the few examples of informal stamp collecting I’m able to get my hands on, but no doubt more of these colorful collections existed.