Your Care of Your Stamps and items of Philately
Whether or not you consider your philatelic and stamp items to be art, your items of philately have in common with art that they are both perishable, not only because of past events and processes over which you no longer have control, but also from present and future preservation and care you as a philatelist may fail to apply.
Many of us would like to ignore that without extra effort on our part, our paper based philatelic stamp treasures will eventually decompose and disintegrate to dust, perhaps even in our own lifetimes. The United States Declaration of Independence is an example of a humble piece of paper that might not have survived, but for the relatively recent extra efforts taken to preserve it.
After you finish reading the following paragraph, ask yourself the question, could it be that the little pieces of philatelic paper that you and I enjoy so much will suffer the same fate as the stamp below?
"What I find remarkable is that we are nervous about our stewardship for a scrap of nineteenth century paper that is sandwiched between a layer of corrosive ink and a smear of gum.
Our historical charge was born in a coal-fired pressroom, dried and cured in a warehouse filled with the acidic stench of an industrial city; it was hefted and hoisted and handled by men and boys who washed but once a month, and laid out then for a month in a drawer of foul inks, glues and gums until a charwoman paid a pence for it, and gave it to a eight-year old girl who licked away most of the gum and smushed the remains with sticky fingers to a rag-based envelope. Our charge then sat there for weeks in the damp bottom of a canvas sack, among the dead rats in the hold of a leaking wooden ship before the dripping bag was hauled ashore through the mud by thoughtless natives sweltering in the tropical salt sea morning – and hauled again, and tossed and sat upon until it was called for by a boy and a dog cart.
Our stamped envelope may then have been taken to the big house where it was delivered through the odorous, splatter-spilled kitchen, to a servant who open it with a fish knife, finally, and delivered it’s contents to the master who raged about it’s message, tossed it and stomped on it and fetched it to the bin, from which it was saved and stacked and tied tightly into a bundle of its kind – and where it lived for a hundred years at the bottom of a wooden trunk. Through heat and hurricanes and floods, our stamp survived unimaginable wars, plagues and pestilence in the company of a child’s chemistry set, a box of damp linens and a tin of melted chocolate.
And one day in our century, a ten-year-old boy found this envelope and popped it into a pot of boiling water, which floated the stamp free to dry on a sheet of yellowed newsprint. Pressed beneath five volumes of Holcomb’s World History, our small scrap of paper was finally consigned to a penny album, fixed with a bit glued tissue, and there was pressed for fifty years until it was discovered to be a rare shade of burnt umber and hurried to an auction house in New York City.
One wonders, then, about the effects of a drop of hydrogen peroxide?" Reprinted with permission of Richard Coffey; all Copyrights reserved
You may be the steward of one or more item of philately that has some particular aesthetics, history, and/or value. Regardless of treatment in the past, the effects of visible light, ultra violet light, temperature, humidity, pollutants, paper, and plastic on your philatelic collection's future depends on the care you provide it in the present.
With regard to how much and what type of care you should expend, the following pages will try help you make that determination.
Please help us by taking our Stamp Care knowledge Survey Here.
Your anonymous answers will help us structure future changes we plan to make to this site. |
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