The Straw-Stacker Stamp Album of Grandpa5000

Warning: Essay-Length Post
Twitter-Equivalent Translation: Looking through my grandpa's stamp collection.  OMG it's cool. Ck out pics!

I kept a stamp collection for a while when I was a kid, and since you’re here it’s a safe bet that you might have as well. Back then, when I visited Grandma and Grandpa5000’s house, I would often dig out their own mothballed stamp collections and get lost in an older, stranger world. It was the first contact I ever had with countries that had since disappeared, unheard-of places like “Lithuania” or “Bosnia,” or “Germany” without an “East” or a “West."  Their stamps were by and large older than mine, as were their stamp albums, and they were, well, the second-most interesting thing in the house, after the jam-packed games cabinet.

When Grandpa died in 2001, my parents very sweetly gave me the stamp collection, and in the decade since I have treasured it – but abstractly, without ever really looking at it. Until a rainy day a few weekends back, when I was repotting some house plants and moving things around and one thing led to another and suddenly I had the old albums spread out on a table, enchanted.


From a strictly personal perspective, it is interesting to read the biographical clues left in the collection by my grandparents. They clearly took up the hobby in about 1961. Grandma was interested in U.S. stamps, mostly contemporary, and liked collecting blocks of four and first-day issues. Grandpa liked older international stamps, and if he had any criteria for their selection it is not at all obvious.  He might have just picked ones he thought looked cool, and if so he and I had some tastes in common. They kept up their collections for about five years, and then they petered out. After that, like me, like you maybe, they just had a box into which they tossed interesting stamps that happened to land on their doorstep, against the possibility that the philatelic bug would bite them again in the future. But it never did.

It hasn’t bit me, either, at not in the sense that I intend to seek out new stamps or even organize the three collections – Grandpa’s, Grandma’s, and seventh-grade Michael5000’s – that I now have in my possession. I’m not a stamp collector. But I have some stamp collections, and as you may have noticed I have an enthusiasm for paper ephemera. Which is why, summarily and without even consulting the Dork, Vice-Dork, or Dorks Emeriti, I am adding stamp imagery to the purview of this online variety magazine. Forewarened is forearmed.

The Reeves & Co. Scrapbook.

One of the most singular items in the grandparental collection is a small album in a agricultural brochure that must date, judging from the graphics, from around the turn of the 20th Century. The handwriting might be Grandpa’s and the stamps are very old, but whether this is an artifact from his youth, or something he put together in 1961 before he got organized, or just something he encountered and kept from the margins of life’s random roads, I don’t know.

Here’s the cover:

On the inside, we see that it is both an account book and an advertisement for a piece of agricultural equipment. I suppose that equipment salesmen must have passed out swag to farmers back in the day the same way that pharmaceutical reps do with doctors now. Also, we see the words “United States” scrawled on the top – by my grandfather? – and that things have been pasted in and then removed. I think this page may have held some of the stamps that eventually ended up in Grandma’s U.S. albums.

On the next page, there’s a message from Reeves and Co. and some info on their new hay stacker…

...and a set of stamps from “England”! We also get a look at the improvised hinges that must have held two more stamps in place at some point.

Another page gives us another page of pre-professional marketing bluster, and some stamps from Germany. Old stamps!

These appear to be – although how would I know, really – from a series issued in 1889, and worth as much as five bucks apiece! ...if, you know, they are unused and in mint condition and not essentially taped to an agricultural pamphlet. Frankly, though, this way is much cooler.

The organizational scheme appears to have been U.S., England, Germany, and Other: the next page brings us specimens from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Italy, the South Africa Colony, India, and Hong Kong.

Then we have a page of what I find is the 1893 “Landing of Columbus 2 Cent” issue.

Wow, you can buy those for $45.00 apiece online! ...mint, unused. Or you can buy used ones for 20 cents.And then, on the right hand side, more writing.

Many of the negro tribes cultivate the soil, raise cattle, sheep, and goats, and manufacture various articles. some are harmless and very industrious while others are ignorant and savage. 

The tribes suffer grately from wars among themselfs and from the cruelties of their chiefs and the Arab slave trader. Some of the natives are tall, brave and well formed. The chiefs of some of the tribes are very creul not only their prisoners but their own subjects. The great desert which is about two thirds as large as the United States is almost destitute of rain.  Places in 

The essay jumps up and continues underneath the stamps -- which, for those of us with sophisticated training in interpreting original documents, yields a clue! This pamphlet was used as a school notebook before it was used as a stamp album!

After this, there are several pages that were set up to track a student's progress in various classes. This log was kept faithfully for three days.

The booklet ends with a list of the countries of Africa…

…and lists of major African rivers, mountains, lakes, and islands.

Two hypotheses: This could be a Depression-era relic of my grandpa’s youth, an old pamphlet adapted for schoolboy use. Or, since the stamps come from a decade or so before Grandpa was born, maybe it is something he picked up from someone else, perhaps a great-grandparent who must, logic dictates, have existed before him (Grandpa didn’t like to talk about his childhood). Either way, what we have here is a typical specimen of a common sort of document from the late 19th or early 20th Century. It has no real value.

Bidding starts at $500.