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A Stamp of Disapproval (Stamp Collecting’s Fate in the Internet Age)

One of the innocent victims of our Brave New Electronic Age has been, I suspect, the hobby of stamp collecting. I’d give odds that there are a great many young people who are only dimly aware of the existence of the institution known as the Post Office. Who needs the Post Office when there is email and texting and tweeting and heaven only knows what else, for I don’t? Far less, then, are they likely to notice those little gummy rectangles pasted on the outside of what is snarkily called “snail mail” by those who, being a little older, know what it is that the Post Office does, or used to.

It’s a pity. Stamp collecting was once one of those phases every boy (and many girls) went through, along with a passion for dinosaurs (or horses) or an interest in space flight (I’m not sure what the feminine equivalent might have been for that).

I collected stamps. I was interested mainly in United States stamps. When I began, I signed up with one of those companies that would send a packet of stamps every month “on approval,” meaning that if I didn’t return them within a few days I had to buy them. They counted on my missing the deadline more often than not. But in this way I learned about stamps from many different countries. I learned that “Eesti” was Estonia, “Magyar” was Hungary, and so on. I learned that the citizens of some place called San Marino evidently spent all their waking hours writing letters; it was only later that I noticed that the company had never sent me a used stamp from San Marino. Eventually I discovered that simply printing stamps and selling them to collectors was a major part of the national product for several countries.

But U.S. stamps were not like that. They were less colorful than the vivid little paintings from San Marino – in fact, they were nearly always printed in a single color – but they were beautifully designed and engraved and printed in subtle and lovely shades. Better still, they commemorated important historic events and persons and accomplishments. How else could I have learned about the landing of Cadillac at Detroit in 1701, or the chartering of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1827, or the 500th anniversary of the Gutenberg Bible, or the centenary of the Gadsden Purchase, to select a few stamp topics from the time when I first began looking at and enjoying them?

Two- and three-color printing began being employed on stamps in the latter 1950s, and fewer of the images were copperplate engravings. Flat color replaced the exquisite line work. Sometime in the ‘60s, I have read, the Post Office bought a five-color press, and that date pretty well corresponds to the end of my interest in current stamps. Since that ghastly “LOVE” stamp of 1972, featuring a pop graphic by Robert Indiana, I’ve taken care not to buy any but definitive-series stamps.

This year the Post Office (sorry; the Postal Service) will issue the usual run of commemoratives, some on worthy subjects, many not. Among the latter: The Simpsons. What I really wonder, now that the Postal Service had gone in whole hog for the San Marino model, is to whom, precisely, it imagines that these will appeal. Completist collectors, I suppose, aging and dwindling though they are; but is it really likely that they will somehow bring the youngsters back to writing letters and licking stamps? Get real, dude.

Postscript: The first commenter who advises me not to have a cow, loses.
Read entire article at Robert McHenry at the Britannica Blog