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I swear, it's not intentional...
Nov. 13th, 2013 11:17 pmOr maybe, subconsciously, it is.
I'm talking about this tendency I've had recently to keep recalling things from my past.
Take, for example, the philatelic auction catalog I got in the mail a few days ago. I had not seen one of these things since junior high school (to judge from the dates of the most recent new U.S. issues in my stamp album).
I doubtless received this most recent catalog as a result of an eBay purchase (go figure, because it was not a large purchase, and the catalog is 120 pages in size, printed in color on heavy coated stock, which is to say it's not exactly cheap to produce or send through the mail).
That won't prevent me from enjoying the contents, however. I recall I was not terribly excited about the auction catalog I ran across as a boy, because it seemed awfully willy-nilly in focus and the things that were on display did not fit into the convenient categories I had come to associate with stamp catalogs. Now, perhaps with the benefit of experience, I look at the offered items with great interest (but alas, the budget is still small).
For example, there is a nice item sent from Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, when the French capital was under siege. The envelope is addressed to a certain Madame Delmas, apparently care of "M.M. Belino et Hendrick" in "Kharchoff, Russia" (today's Kharkiv, in Ukraine). What makes the envelope particularly valuable (the auction house has set 2500 euros as the starting bid) is that it was sent via the world's first sustained (even if short-lived) air mail service, in a piloted hot air balloon.
I look at such envelopes and allow myself to wonder about things like who Madame Delmas might have been, why she was in Ukraine, and why it was important for her correspondent to invest 80 centimes and write her a letter that might never arrive (I mean, the Germans were not too keen on having mail-laden balloons flying past their lines, and did what they could to force them to land and be captured).
It will be interesting to see what the lots shown in the catalog fetch.
Cheers...
I'm talking about this tendency I've had recently to keep recalling things from my past.
Take, for example, the philatelic auction catalog I got in the mail a few days ago. I had not seen one of these things since junior high school (to judge from the dates of the most recent new U.S. issues in my stamp album).
I doubtless received this most recent catalog as a result of an eBay purchase (go figure, because it was not a large purchase, and the catalog is 120 pages in size, printed in color on heavy coated stock, which is to say it's not exactly cheap to produce or send through the mail).
That won't prevent me from enjoying the contents, however. I recall I was not terribly excited about the auction catalog I ran across as a boy, because it seemed awfully willy-nilly in focus and the things that were on display did not fit into the convenient categories I had come to associate with stamp catalogs. Now, perhaps with the benefit of experience, I look at the offered items with great interest (but alas, the budget is still small).
For example, there is a nice item sent from Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, when the French capital was under siege. The envelope is addressed to a certain Madame Delmas, apparently care of "M.M. Belino et Hendrick" in "Kharchoff, Russia" (today's Kharkiv, in Ukraine). What makes the envelope particularly valuable (the auction house has set 2500 euros as the starting bid) is that it was sent via the world's first sustained (even if short-lived) air mail service, in a piloted hot air balloon.
I look at such envelopes and allow myself to wonder about things like who Madame Delmas might have been, why she was in Ukraine, and why it was important for her correspondent to invest 80 centimes and write her a letter that might never arrive (I mean, the Germans were not too keen on having mail-laden balloons flying past their lines, and did what they could to force them to land and be captured).
It will be interesting to see what the lots shown in the catalog fetch.
Cheers...
