As a boy I lived for a time with my grandmother. Having lived through the depression in America in the 1930s, she kept virtually everything. Old newspaper clippings. Sears catalogs. Reader's Digest magazines. Souvenirs from both her travels and things others had brought her. Postcards, letters, and stamps.
The postcards fascinated me as a boy. I loved the images of other places, the world I hadn't yet experienced. I was entranced by the descriptions of activities on the back. The short, truncated language used to conserve the limited writing space. And the stamps.
The smallest of images were the most interesting, emerging from their grid of postmark lines, the date and place often legible in its circular frame. The countries I'd never heard of, the miniature landscapes and buildings, the flora and fauna of distant jungles, deserts and islands.
As I grew older I began to receive my own correspondence from family and friends. My father in Leningrad, or Casablanca. My grandmother in Fiji, Jerusalem, or her favorite destination, Honolulu. I started my own collection.
For my tenth birthday she bought me a stamp collecting book, and taught me how to steam the delicate paper to release gummed stamps from cards and envelopes. I dug through her piles and found older collections of letters, stamps from another era, engraved and reservedly colored. Illustrations of earlier times I could view through my magnifier and unknown countries I could find in the collecting book.
Sometime in my teens I put away the stamp book for the last time. My father at some point included it in a box to be taken to the Salvation Army, and I didn't even notice it had gone.
A decade later I found myself traveling, writing, posting little messages on the backs of cards. The fascination of affixing a licked stamp, choosing the precise placement and adding an airmail sticker reengaged this earlier fascination, and I began to buy more stamps than I actually needed. Soon I found stalls that sold little bags brimming with color. Used stamps from each country I visited. Hundreds on offer for less than the price of lunch.
I started collecting again. Ostensibly for my mother, who made jewelry and was using the little images as a focal point for broaches and necklace pendants. On my return home I only selected a small portion to pass on to her, and kept the rest in a drawer. Then two drawers. Then more.
I never knew quite what to do with them. I'd look occasionally, sometimes include them on letters to friends, sometimes make a small collage for a gift.
Recently, during the relentless monotony and anxiety of the first lockdown in London, I began, as many did, to consider what to do to make our home more interesting, colorful, diverse and stimulating. I went through photographs, prints we had sitting around, posters. We put some up, and they were fine. But then I remembered the stamp drawers.
I opened them up for the first time in a long while, dug through the little glassine envelopes, brought forth hidden miniature worlds and began to scan them. Seeing them big for the first time since looking through that magnifier decades ago, I fell in love again.
That is how Stamp and Post began.
