Punk on display

How an idiot got his collection shown at an international event

Uh oh. Did I just unlock a new level on my journey into stamp collecting, or sink to a new low?

A few weeks ago, my local club held its annual competition, where members are encouraged to mount a display of their choice. For the uninitiated, a display is when a collector lays out some of their material on sheets of paper, writes accompanying notes, and slaps it all up in a frame (a kind of noticeboard structure), so people can gather around and admire their friends’ mad collecting skillz.

Displays are similar to exhibits, which you’ll find at philatelic exhibitions, usually being ignored by most people in attendance. The glorious difference between a ‘display’ and an ‘exhibit’ is one of expectations. Exhibits take themselves very seriously. They’re all about Classes and Rules and Treatment. But displays are more like, ‘Check out the stuff I just slapped up on the wall!’ There are fewer rules, and no one really minds if you break them. There’s room for, dare I say it, fun. A display can still be properly researched, or contain rare or impressive material. But it’s fine if it isn’t/doesn’t. Judging, if it happens, probably shouldn’t go too hard.

I’ve only ever been a bystander at these club competitions, but I’ve seen some amazing material. Case in point: stamps that were printed by inmates of Gross Born POW camp in then-Germany (now Poland) during World War II to commemorate some unofficial Olympic Games they were holding. As Soviet forces approached in 1945, the prisoners were force-marched westward by their captors. If I remember the story correctly, the man who printed the stamps took them with him on the march in a briefcase, and when he was too weak to carry the briefcase, it was carried by his colleagues. The stamps and their creator both survived – his daughter was the exhibitor – and now these incredibly rare artifacts were right in front of me. Extraordinary survivors and an extraordinary story.

Other entrants in recent years took in Apollo 13, the Indian state of Jaipur, German inflation stamps of the 1920s, monkeys, and the history of aquariums. I never cease to be amazed at the diversity that stamp collectors collect.

That display on aquariums touches on the informality of displays vs exhibitions. It was a few pages short of the 15 that it takes to fill a frame. So the last three pages boasted a fish made of fish stamps.

How deliciously anarchic. If you tried that in an Exhibition, the judges’ heads would literally explode with brains and everything, and the President-General of some institution with ‘Royal’ in the title would ban you from Philately for life. Even at the club display night, I think I saw some people getting the tremors.

For a long time, I didn’t think that anything I collected was worth the effort of displaying, nor that anyone would be interested in it. But I have started to come around. It helps that I’ve refined my collecting interests, and I now go deep in certain areas, instead of being the unfocussed generalist that I once was. It also helps that when I have shown some of my material informally at the club or online, I’ve had a lot of encouragement from fellow collectors. On top of that, I’m sceptical about the long-term future of some aspects of traditional philately, and I figure that maybe I should try exhibiting while I still can. Before everybody dies.

I’m a while away from exhibiting. But a week out from the club competition, I thought, why not try a display?

I felt unprepared, but I could take some shortcuts. Instead of buying and laying out proper exhibition sheets, I grabbed some old looseleaf album sheets that I had lying around. I didn’t have the mounts required to show off single stamps or blocks, but I figured that with a pack of photo corners, I could build something out of my covers. 

I also wasn’t ready to write up some of the specialty areas that I’m into these days, so I dug up an old interest. I once had a dream to build a specialist collection of Australia’s 1988 Living Together issue, a popular set of stamps featuring cartoon depictions of Australian life. The plan was short-lived. It was blown out of the water when, at an exhibition, I saw the very collection I had hoped to build. It had the preliminary designs, printing proofs, errors, and covers showing commercial usage. There was no catching up. I should be thankful that that collector showed off his collection, or I would have spent years chasing a foolish dream.

But, lying neglected in my cupboard, one vestige of my dream remained: an album of commercial covers. The competition needed one frame, 15 sheets. I did some quick maths. With 27 values in the set, I could fit two covers to a page, leaving room for a couple of oversize items to have a page to themselves. I could show one example of commercial usage for every stamp in the set. And for each cover, I would dig into the postal rates of the time and calculate exactly which service the stamps on the envelope were paying for. That’s right, this guy knows how to PARTY!

I chose some favourite covers and laid them out on the old album sheets as a test run. I was assisted by Quackers, the household’s woollen duck. I am a grown adult man.

Because it was a display, I didn’t have to choose the ‘best’ or the ‘rarest’ of anything. I even ignored the golden rule of collecting commercial covers: my people idolise ‘solo covers’, where the featured stamp is the only stamp on the envelope. I decided that some of those covers were just a bit common and dull. I ended up with a mix of four selection criteria: rarity, visual appeal, interesting postal rate, or ‘it’s the only one that fits on the page’.

As I sat down to write up my display, I had a dumb idea, so naturally I went with it. Each cover was a little mystery: when was it sent, where was it going, what postal rate applied, and how did the Living Together stamp contribute to paying this rate? And with mysteries to solve, I roped in the most famous detective there ever was.

That’s more exciting a title than ‘The Postal Usage of Australia’s 1988 Living Together Series’, isn’t it? Call Benedict Cumberbatch, this one could be a movie.

With a half-baked idea in my head and a glass of the good stuff in my hand, I took a ballpoint and a pack of felt-tipped pens, and created my first ever display. 27 commercial covers, with my hand-written workings-out, and occasional appearances from cartoon Sherlock.

Before I had even finished writing it up, I noticed something surprising. In the process of curating and presenting this neglected material, I had started to enjoy it again. I’ve missed you, Living Together. I wondered whether I could exhibit just the covers. I didn’t know.

After slightly too many hours and possibly another drink, I was done.

The duck was under the table after the first whisky.

When I showed up at the club a few days later, I was surprised to be assigned the last available frame in the room. These nights usually attract five or six entries. This year it was 17! Plus a good crowd of onlookers. It’s philately’s year, folks, I can just feel it.

Elation turned to despair as I slipped my sheets into the frame. They fell too far into the plastic strips that hold them in place, leaving the last few lines of each page obscured. Luckily, help was at hand in the form of my friend Vanessa, who had learned the hard way in previous competitions to use Blu Tack to pin your sheets higher than the retainer strips. Phew! First a fish made of fish, and now this. She’s a genius.

Although not as intense as an exhibition, the club championship judging was led by Charles, a member who happens to be an internationally-accredited philatelic judge. I thought my entry was so dumb that I suggested not being judged at all. I was happy just to have gotten off my butt and mounted a display. But I was light-heartedly informed that judging was mandatory, and dispatched to the back hall to join everyone else for wine and nibbles.

Before long, we were all invited back to look at the displays for ourselves, and to contemplate which one would receive our vote in the other award on offer for the night: the People’s Choice. It’s a ‘drop your marble in the bucket’ system.

Again I was struck by the incredible diversity of the displays, from very traditional exhibits, to postal history, to thematic subjects. Who would get my marble? Mail from the Buckingham Palace post office? The Sydney Harbour Bridge? The US wine revenue stamps? The Concorde? Rocket mail? The Great Masters of Music? ‘Return to Sender’ handstamps?

At last Charles was invited to present the trophy, and the award went to a new member, Frank, for his display on Slovenia. I was happy for him, it was Slovenia that got my marble. Ray won People’s Choice with his stamps from the island of Lundy. Lundy has puffins. The people love the puffins.

The big surprise was that the judges gave an honourable mention to none other than yours truly! I was genuinely stunned. Check out this happy nerd.

I had a good chat to Charles afterwards, who was savvy enough to spot that there were some genuine rarities in my display, even if it’s modern material that sells cheap because no one cares. He also appreciated the philatelic knowledge that went into my analysis of the postal rates, even if it was delivered by a cartoon character of Sherlock Holmes. I learned that yes, with a few tweaks, I could turn this into a proper exhibit if I wanted to. But Charles cautioned that the write-up would have to be a bit more serious. “I can’t guarantee,” he said with a wry smile, “that any international judges would get your sense of humour.”

What’s that, reader? You’d like to see more detail but the photo resolution won’t allow it? Well, have I got news for you! The UK’s Philatelic Traders’ Society’s annual Virtual Stampex online exhibition is online as at the time I hit Publish on this post (2-4 May 2024). Virtual Stampex has always included an exhibition section, but this year, it was billed as ‘Display Your Way’. It aimed to attract a range of collecting levels, from formal award-winning exhibits, to draft pages, to creative concepts. And most importantly, there were no rules! And you know who loves philatelic competitions with no rules: this guy. So I sent my display in, and now you can see it for yourself. Register for Virtual Stampex (it’s free) and click on ‘Displays’ at the top. Look for the farmer dialling the Australia-shaped phone. (The displays will remain online for a while after the exhibition ends.)

(I used the boring title here to quickly get the topic across. I thought the title on the display might have sounded like nonsense when you can’t see the material in front of your face.)

Take a look and be amazed as a man tries to use a cartoon to deflect from the clear evidence that he’s a massive anorak! See if you can spot the marks left behind by stamp hinges on my second-hand pages! Squint at some of the fine print because the pages were too big to scan in the time I had available so I photographed them on an improvised lightbox! Look for the bit where I make a mistake and try to explain it away because I couldn’t be bothered rewriting the whole page! It’s an absolute dog’s breakfast.

I recommend looking at ALL the displays and also taking some time to wander through the whole online experience. It really does manage to capture a little bit of what it’s like being at a real-life stamp exhibition, only without the orgies. You never know, maybe you’ll find something to collect, or maybe even display?

But a word of warning. I think get it now. I have caught the bug. I was poking through the lots on offer at an auction last week when I found myself looking at some stamps that usually wouldn’t interest me. It’s just that I caught myself thinking, “Hmmm, they’d make a good one-framer.”

Help…

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