Stamping Ground

LONDON —  My husband, G.J., picks up his pace--unconsciously, he claims--as we draw closer to our destination, one of London’s many stamp shops. G.J. is a philatelist. There are worse vices, to be sure, but I know full well that I play second fiddle to stamps on the first days of any journey abroad. Barely off the plane, not yet unpacked, I do my stamp duty with G.J., accompanying him on his rounds to add to his various collections, or to bargain, trade, browse or simply chat stamps.

London is undoubtedly the European mecca of stamp collectors. While Paris has its Rue Drouot and Madrid its Sunday stamp market in the Plaza Mayor, London has a cluster of shops on and around the Strand, a major thoroughfare that runs northeast from Trafalgar Square to the commercial and banking district known as The City. It’s a few blocks from Covent Garden, and the most famous stamp shop on the Strand undoubtedly is Stanley Gibbons. The city has stamp auction houses as well, a philatelic bookstore, a major collection in the British Museum, and an entire museum, the National Postal Museum, devoted to the subject.

This March, I sat quietly and watched the scene in one London store, Rowan Baker’s Covent Garden Stamp Shop, delightfully crammed floor to ceiling with displays of postage stamps, antique postcards, first-day-of-issue covers, albums, catalogs and the related paraphernalia--long skinny tongs, perforation gauges, magnifying glasses.

I observed the traffic both in and outside the shop: the curious passersby drawn by the pretty array of stamps in the windows, and the tourists who periodically came in for just the right postage stamp for a picture postcard. Some proprietors resent such intrusions, but Baker obliged with a bit of dry British wit and a “Cheerio.” Tourists, after all, are his and other London stamp dealers’ bread and butter; they buy not only postage but stamps as souvenirs.

I watched, too, as the serious collectors came in, those who might spend a quarter of an hour or more scrutinizing only one or two stamps. In this and dozens of shops like it across Europe, I have seen sales so discreetly handled that one hardly notices the transaction at all, only the handshake that concludes it. In England, however, where philately has proved an enduring pastime, there often is less of the hushed and reverential atmosphere characteristic of many continental stamp shops. I have become accustomed, across Europe, to dealers’ dour dispositions. So although I hate to admit it, I rather enjoy joining G.J. on his stamp outings in London, where I might be treated to a smile, a joke, a “How’re you today, luv?” by the staff at Royale or Steven Scott.

But while there was much to do in the way of philately this early spring week--a remarkably mild and sunny one--I hardly qualified as a stamp widow. Comfortably settled into an efficiency apartment in Bloomsbury, our favorite London lodging, only a five-minute walk from the British Museum, we spent much of our week gazing at the daffodils punctuating window boxes and city squares, and sandwiched our stamp hunting between museum hopping and queuing up for theater tickets at the half-price booth in Leicester Square.

Meanwhile, my stamp education broadened considerably. I learned that London’s penchant for philately stems from England’s history as the first nation to devise a uniform, public system of prepaid mail delivery. Although various forms of postal service have existed since the days of the ancient Egyptians, it was not until British educator Sir Rowland Hill set out to institute postal reform in the 1830s that the idea for the prepaid adhesive postage stamp was born, an idea that brought modern postal practices into being.

That first stamp that had glue on the back, the Penny Black, is perhaps the most revered stamp in the world, and it is a common sight in London stamp shops. Issued on May 6, 1840, the Penny Black shows a young Queen Victoria in cream-colored profile against a dark background, an image that went unchanged for 25 years.

“It’s a classic design,” said Michael McKillip, an American collector of British stamps and covers (envelopes with stamps still affixed and clearly canceled), whom we met browsing in Baker’s shop.

Baker agreed, noting that every English stamp issued since 1840 has incorporated in its design the reigning monarch’s profile.

“We’re the only nation in the world,” he said, “whose name does not appear on its stamps. English stamps are identified solely by the royal profile.”

Within a few years of the Penny Black’s issue, most of the countries of the world had issued their own adhesive stamps and modeled their postal services after the British plan, which regulated domestic delivery charges by weight, not distance traveled. (The U.S. this year is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its first issues, a 5-cent and a 10-cent stamp bearing the likenesses of Benjamin Franklin, a deputy postmaster general, and George Washington respectively.)

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I found it surprising that the world’s first postage stamp is neither rare nor costly. In the Steven Scott Stamp Co. on the Strand, Penny Blacks are prominently displayed and described in the specialized language of philately. Like collectibles of any kind, price is determined by condition and availability. A Penny Black in “very fine” condition costs around $350, but a specimen described as an album “space filler” costs a mere $35.

Baker sells 15 or so Penny Blacks a year to American customers, some for as little as $53. They are inexpensive, he said, because they are common, and common because they survived. They survived because they were affixed directly to letters and not necessarily to envelopes, which of course are easily discarded. Many Penny Blacks, he said, come from banks and solicitors’ offices; since correspondence was kept on file, so were the stamps.

But sometimes the letters themselves prove as interesting or compelling as the stamps. Baker recently sold a Penny Black letter describing the horrid conditions at a late 19th century school in Northern England. The purchaser was a schoolteacher.

For a non-collector like me, the history that stamps reveal, the geography they bring to mind and the culture they reflect are far more interesting than the arcane matters of paper weight, color variations and numbers of perforations. And on this London visit, I soaked up more culture when G.J. took me along on a visit to Vera Trinder’s on Bedford Street at the edge of Covent Garden, a London shop specializing not in stamps but in supplies, catalogs and philatelic literature.

I am instantly at home among books, but I hadn’t anticipated how fascinating I would find Trinder’s bookshelves, where I found titles of works--and thus a specialized world of knowledge--I hardly imagined existed. Who knew there were handsome, hardcover books on “Three Centuries of Scottish Posts” or “An Account of the Famous English Stamp Fraud Trials, 1890-92.” I wandered among such evocative titles as “The Revenue and Telegraph Stamps of the Transvaal” and “The Postal History of American POWS in WWII.”

If the titles in Trinder’s represented a glimpse into the range and substance of the world of philately and postal history, then our visit to the philatelic collection of the British Museum on Great Russell Street offered a more thorough orientation. Deep in the museum’s east wing, in the long and narrow corridor of the King’s Library, a fraction of the museum’s 8-million-item philatelic collection is on display, arranged in vertical slide-out cases for easy viewing. Here, the Tapling exhibit is the highlight because it represents one man’s grand passion for philately.

A lawyer and member of Parliament, Keay Tapling (1855-’91) began collecting stamps as a boy and amassed more than 100,000 items. Covering the years 1840 to 1890, the collection contains the basic issues as well as the significant varieties of all stamp-issuing nations.

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Much of the Victorian world was under British dominion, and stamps from the far-flung corners of the empire appear in the collection, the exotic syllables of which perhaps captured the imagination of that small English boy as it does mine now: Bahawalpur, St. Helena, Cashmere [sic], Stellaland, Natal.

Complementing Tapling’s collection are other specialized displays, many also donated to the museum by private collectors. One of the most poignant is the Polish Postal History exhibit, donated in 1966 by M.A. Bojanowicz, which documents Polish determination and ingenuity in finding ways of subverting German authority during World War II. The Poles established an underground mail system--complete with stamps and cancellation marks--that operated even in the ghettos, internment and concentration camps, and among the Polish Free Forces in and outside the country.

As luck would have it, during our London stay one of the city’s great auction houses, Phillips International Auctioneers and Valuers, was holding a stamp auction in its New Bond Street premises. Founded in 1796, and occupying an old building brimming with showrooms of paintings, furniture, old silver and jewelry, Phillips is less well known, but in knowledgeable circles rivals Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

We picked up a catalog for the auction, a list of 613 separate lots of stamps and related items (covers, letters, meter-marked envelopes, postcards, books), from a 1942 Aden set (a former British colony, now Yemen) to 1980 Yugoslavia mint regular issues. I particularly noted the World War II items that recalled the desperate struggle to communicate. One lot was labeled “Undercover Mail: 1941 covers from Holland to P.O. Box 252, New York, or France to P.O. Box 506, Lisbon.” Estimated value was about $175 to $210.

While the auction was not at all remarkable--just fast-paced transactions of the bidding and buying of numbered lots--my thoughts turned inevitably to the endless possibilities of human stories that lay behind them. Who in Holland in 1941 was trying to reach someone in New York? Did they succeed?

As G.J. and I wrapped up our London visit, we had one more philatelic stop to make--to the National Postal Museum on King Edward Street. I was disappointed to find the museum temporarily closed while the building was undergoing renovation. (It has since reopened.) But no doubt we will explore it when next in London, for philately will always be on our itinerary.

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GUIDEBOOK

Letter Perfect in London

Stamp shops: The Covent Garden Stamp Shop, 28 Bedfordbury St., Covent Garden, London, WC2N 4RB; local telephone 0171-379-1448. Mon.-Fri. 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m. (Tube stop: Covent Garden)

Royale Stamp Co., 110 St. Martins Lane, London, WC2N 4AZ; tel. 0171-240-1963. Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. (Tube stop: Leicester Square)

Stanley Gibbons Ltd., 399 The Strand, London, WC2R OLX; tel. 0171-836-8444. Mon.-Fri. 8:30 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. (Tube stop: Charing Cross)

Steven Scott Stamp Co., 77 The Strand, London, WC2R ODE; tel. 0171-836-2341. Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. (Tube stop: Charing Cross)

Books and supplies: Vera Trinder Ltd., 38 Bedford St., London, WC2E 9EU; tel. 0171-836-2365. Mon.-Fri. 8:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. (Tube stop: Charing Cross)

Stanley Gibbons (above) stocks a large selection of stamp supplies and literature.

London stamp auctions: (All the stamp shops listed above run periodic mail auctions. Write or call for catalogs.)

Phillips, 101 New Bond St., London, W1Y OAS; Philatelic Department; tel. 0171-629-6602 . Forthcoming stamp auctions: June 19, 26 and July 17 and 24.

Sotheby’s, 34-35 New Bond St., London, W1A 2AA; tel. 0171-493-8080. Next scheduled philatelic auction: July 17-18..

Philatelic exhibits: British Museum Philatelic Collection, King’s Library, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG; tel. 0171-412-7635, Web site https://www.bl.uk/. Hours: Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 2:30-6 p.m.

National Postal Museum, King Edward Street, London EC1A lLP; tel. 0171-600-8914. Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. (Tube stop: St. Paul’s)