The Philatelist

“It happens more than just sometimes that overly refined persons like thee and me may opt to turn away from ordinary things and seek entry into a more perfect world than this one. I’m thinking about art galleries, concert halls, coin and stamp collections, ingenious mechanical devices or a well-played chess match. People like you spend too much time gazing at the stars while others, like my good friend who offers us a case study of the type, has traded away his life in a still-continuing struggle to assemble a non-representative array of the world’s most beautiful postage stamps. A little custodial ‘art gallery,’ he calls it, his own bespoken domain after three failed marriages and a deleterious son. All the elements, I’ve been told, can be found in a single drop of sea water. So, too, with a choice collection of the world’s postage brought together for aesthetic purposes. Thus my friend.  One doesn’t need to be a good person, remember, to be extraordinarily interesting anyway.”—From the author