In the 1920s and ’30s, a lot of overseas correspondence was conducted by mail. Clerks at The New York Times were instructed to remove stamps from arriving letters and tape or paste them in an album, country by country.
Why? A good guess is that stamp collecting, or philately, was seen as a splendid way for young people — like newspaper clerks — to learn history by osmosis.
The Times’s album testifies to the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany, where hyperinflation drove stamp prices into the hundreds of millions of German marks, followed by the rise of the Third Reich (when swastikas began to appear on postage).
Stamps labeled “Philippine Islands, United States of America” recall the period of American control there; those labeled “Palestine” recall the British mandate. The embryonic Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic repurposed stamps bearing the double-headed eagle of imperial Russia by overprinting a hammer and sickle.
“These are the kinds of things that really teach you about the world,” Matthew Healey said recently as he looked over the postage album at the Museum at The Times, where the album is kept today. Mr. Healey was a layout editor at The Times from 2004 to 2012 and now edits a quarterly newsletter called The Philatelic Communicator. His father, Barth Healey (1939-2008), was a Times editor who wrote the stamp column, an exploration of stamp collecting and design, from 1988 to 1993. Given the poor condition of the album, Mr. Healey said it had no monetary value.
In other words: It’s worthless but priceless.
The post History Lessons on One-Inch Templates appeared first on New York Times.
