There’s always a lot of talk in the hobby about recruiting new stamp collectors and I’ve never really had anyone that I could encourage. My kids, as I’ve said before, they were both born without the collector gene and they aren’t interested in collecting anything. Nobody else I know cares. It was only very recently that I finally found someone who showed a little interest and…
Well, read on and see why this isn’t turning out well.
So I know someone who has, from time to time, shown a little interest in stamp collecting, mostly when I talk about it. I’m not one of those crazy people who is constantly trying to foist it on others. I look at sales and auctions from time to time, I have a set of 2017 Scott catalogs just sitting there, but I don’t usually bring it up if others aren’t interested.
He was though, at least tangentially and when I’d be looking over stamps online, he might get behind me and watch as we talked. So one day, we were talking about something unrelated, something about eastern Europe and post-WWII and I figured I could tell him about the early postal history of Latvia.
For those who don’t know, Latvia and the other Baltic states, they had been bounced around from Germany to Poland to Russia, etc. throughout their existence. They always wanted to be free, they just never had the chance, at least until 1919. That year, Germany was a little busy licking its wounds after WWI and Russia was concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution from 1917 and Latvia decided to declare its independence while nobody was looking.
One of the first things most new countries do once they have the ability is to issue stamps. Unfortunately, at the time, the region was undergoing a severe paper shortage following the war and they couldn’t. Instead, they found a stash of old German maps that local printers were in the middle of producing at the end of the war. They had only been printed on one side and since Germany wasn’t going to be coming by to pick them up any time soon, Latvia seized on the idea of using that paper for their first issue of stamps.
Therefore, all of the first issues, they all have German map fragments on the back side. They were available for 12 days before Russia figured out what was going on and invaded, driving the fledgling government out of the capitol city. The stamp plates were left behind and presumably destroyed while the government went into exile and a war raged until 1921. There were enough stamps that had been made that got away, but when the government got back into power down the road, they made new plates and actually produced new stamps on actual paper. This went on until 1940 when, in the midst of WWII, Russia took over the Baltic states until 1991 when the Soviet Union fell and they regained their independence.
He thought that was a fantastic story. It showed inventiveness, heroism and spunk and he decided that he wanted to collect Latvian stamps, pre-Soviet era, from 1919-1940. He had an eBay account already and I set him up with accounts on both HipStamp and Delcampe and sent him on his way, figuring I’d done my philatelic good deed for the day.
It just isn’t working out that way. He came back to me a little while later, asking where he should go for the stamps because, on all of the sites he now had accounts on, none of them had much to go for. It isn’t like Latvian stamps in the early days are worth anything, a buck or two at most and, interestingly, they seem to be worth more used than mint most of the time. This is likely because of the limited number of legitimately used examples, not being available for very long at all.
So I went on a hunt for some sources. I figured there had to be dealers, maybe in eastern Europe, who would have access to these stamps and he could just place an order and get a chunk of his collection at once. Shipping would be higher but at least he could get a bunch at a time.
Nope. There doesn’t seem to be anyone that is carrying Latvian stamps at all. You might find someone with one or two, but if he wanted to order Latvia 1-20, for instance, the majority of those aren’t available, period, even though you could get them all, with one exception, for $2-3 each or less. Yet there aren’t any dealers that I could find that had them for sale.
Therefore, I asked the stamp collecting community for help. Surely someone has to know where a brand new collector can go to find some stamps. Unfortunately, they don’t know either.
One suggested bidding on a $600 auction for a ton of Latvian stamps, including post-Soviet issues. Yeah, my friend doesn’t have any stamps at all, he’s just trying it out to see how it goes and the idea of dropping hundreds of dollars, effectively on day one, that’s not going to fly.
I did find out that a lot of people were having the same problem though. Lots of people can’t find the stamps they need, even inexpensive stamps issued in the millions. That’s the same problem that my wife is having with her Japanese collection. She has a pretty complete collection of Japan from the late 1800s on. She’s missing some of the high values but mostly, she’s got a whole ton of stamps in there. She stopped around 1990 and she wants to keep going, yet there isn’t anyone out there with a good stock of modern Japanese stamps anywhere. We’ve looked and come up empty.
These are insanely common though. They should be worth face value and were issued in the hundreds of millions, yet nobody carries them. Most of these stamps she got at shows back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but there aren’t shows today. It isn’t just because of Covid, the majority of shows have evaporated and the ones that remain, they are a shadow of the ones we used to go to, which in turn, are a whisper of the ones I went to back in the early 80s. There really aren’t any large local shows, the only one there was, it hasn’t been held for 2 years and probably won’t be held this year, not because of the pandemic, just because they can’t find a place to hold it.
This really is disturbing when you consider that we want to get new people into the hobby, but we can’t figure out how to get people the stamps that they want to collect. I wouldn’t say if this was rare material but it’s not. It shouldn’t be anyhow. I brought up my wife’s problems and the only solution anyone had was another auction, currently sitting at $10,000 (yes, that’s ten thousand dollars) that has a ton of new material, as well as a bunch she already has. Yeah, that’s not going to work, is it?
I’m starting to understand why people aren’t picking up the hobby, or if they are, they’re just accumulating random stamps or diving into the really commonly available stuff (mostly 1st world countries like U.S., Canada, Germany and UK) because the rest just isn’t out there. If it’s expensive, sure. You can find it at auction at a hefty price tag, but what about the stamps that everyone starts out with? Where is that?
Where is it indeed? That’s what I’d really like to know. We very well might lose a collector who was excited to get started because the stories that interested him the most, there’s nothing to back it up. I find that incredibly sad. I really don’t want to see him walk away but maybe he will. What does that say about the future of the hobby?
Nothing good.
