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Finding Your Hobby: Stamp Collecting

In this membership-drive mini-series, we get to know about hobbies and building skills and finding communities for fun. Today, Charles Epting, philatelist and vice president at Siegel Auction Galleries, shares his passion for collecting stamps as pieces of history.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC all through this membership drive. We're exploring some of the popular ways we spend our time honing new skills and finding other people as obsessed as we are with making things with yarn, clay, or glass or spotting new birds. Yes, it's our end-of-membership drive or end-of-show during the membership drive Hobbies series.

Today, we're going to talk about the classic hobby of collecting, specifically stamp collecting. People still do it. We're joined for this by Charles Epting, stamp collector, or philatelist as they call them to be fancy, and a vice president at Siegel Auction Galleries, where they recently sold a famous Inverted Jenny stamp for a record $2 million.

Hey, Charles, welcome to WNYC.

Charles Epting: Thanks very much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: What's an Inverted Jenny stamp?

Charles Epting: The Inverted Jenny is arguably the most famous American postage stamp. In 1918, Airmail was a new invention. The idea of carrying mail via airplane was this radical, crazy idea, and the government printed special postage stamps to commemorate this new service. Famously, on one sheet of 100 stamps, they printed the airplane upside down in relation to the frame, and in the century or so since the stamp was printed, it has become the most legendary, iconic American stamp.

Brian Lehrer: Why stamp collecting for you? It sounds like such an old-fashioned pastime.

Charles Epting: Growing up, I collected just about everything but postage stamps, whether it was fossils or books, anything historic. Stamp collecting, to me, at least had this stigma that it skewed older and wasn't exactly relevant or cool. When I got to college, I was studying history, and I had this epiphany that postage stamps were not merely little pieces of paper that you would try and collect one of each, but rather, they were artistic, cultural, historic windows into the past, their relics and eyewitnesses to the period in which they were created.

Once I looked at stamps that way, once I realized what they could tell us about our past, it instantly became a lot cooler and a lot more interesting, and I threw myself into it fully and was fortunate enough to not only pursue it as a hobby but turn it into a career.

Brian Lehrer: Does the relationship to stamp collecting as a hobby wind up changed in today's world because few people send letters by mail anymore really?

Charles Epting: Absolutely. We, my generation, I'm 30 years old, are not used to receiving stamps on mail coming into our homes. I think that a lot of people started collecting because you could collect without going out and finding stamps. They would come to you. They would arrive every day with the postman, but today, that can't be said. I think there's definitely some early exposure that's lost, and people who want to collect stamps now have to seek it out and go out and find it rather than passively letting it find them.

Brian Lehrer: How would somebody get started stamp collecting today?

Charles Epting: The great thing is it's amazing how we can apply 21st-century solutions to a 19th-century hobby. The internet has made it incredibly easy for people to learn more about a collection they inherit or to begin collecting themselves. Here in New York, there's a group called the Collectors Club that's been around since the 1890s. They're one of the most incredible historic stamp-collecting societies in the world, and we're very lucky to have them in our backyard. They're about to open a new clubhouse overlooking Bryant Park in just a couple of months, and that's a great resource for New Yorkers.

People around the country, there's a group called the American Philatelic Society that has over 30,000 members. They're the national governing body of stamp collectors. If you reach out to a group like that, you'll find that there's people of all ages, all backgrounds. Some of them like to attend shows and meetings in person. Some of them are purely online, and even though it feels like maybe an antiquated dying hobby in a lot of ways, it's very easy to connect with people and find others like yourself out there who share the same compulsion and passion for these little old pieces of paper.

Brian Lehrer: Were you there at the auction for this Inverted Jenny stamp that we started talking about at the beginning of the segment? Only 100 of them printed with the image inverted way back when they were made. This one sold for $2 million at auction. Were you at that auction?

Charles Epting: I was. I was in the room for that. That is the record price for a single United States postage stamp. We were all holding our breath. Bidders, they don't make themselves known until the day of the sale. We were very anxious going into it and just elated when it broke that record and broke the $2 million mark.

Brian Lehrer: Did the person who won the auction say anything? Were they physically in the room? Did they express any emotion around this?

Charles Epting: Yes. He was physically in the room. He's a wonderful stamp collector. He collected as a child and then moved away from it. This is the typical progression you see is that people may be collected when they were in school and then got distracted by life and careers and everything. Then, he came back to the hobby and has decided to acquire all of those things that he had his eye on as a child. He was very proud to add it to his collection. He was sitting there with the paddle in his hand. I don't think he was going to let anyone else outbid him that evening. It was great to see the look on his face when the hammer fell.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Charles, are there any stamp-collecting controversies or divides in how people go about it?

Charles Epting: Yes. One of the big ones that evolved over the decades, I would say, is whether to leave the stamps on their original envelopes or not. In the early days of the hobby, it was about gathering as many different stamps as possible. You'd cut off the corners of the envelope or soak them off with water, but in recent times, people have realized that divorcing the stamp from the envelope removes a lot of its context and a lot of its history.

Just recently, I was going through a collection. I found a letter from a court reporter, an American court reporter at the Nuremberg trials in Germany who wrote a letter to his friend back in Illinois, an eyewitness account of the Nuremberg trials. I'm so fortunate that his friend didn't hand it off to a kid or something to take the stamp off the envelope because we would've been deprived of this wonderful piece of history.

I think that this is one of the great ways that the hobby has evolved over the years to allow for more historical context and allow us to read these wonderful firsthand eyewitness accounts of the past.

Brian Lehrer: 15 seconds, do you have a favorite stamp in your collection?

Charles Epting: The stamp I collect is from 1933. It honors the National Recovery Act, which was one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs. I love the cultural history behind the stamp that Roosevelt himself, a stamp collector, used stamps as propaganda to advance his own political agenda.

Brian Lehrer: How about that? Charles Epting, thanks so much for sharing your hobby of stamp collecting.

Charles Epting: Brian, thank you very much.

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