If you are looking for a safe, interesting, and educational hobby for yourself and your children, you could do worse than to buy stamps and sort them into stamp albums. This hobby, known as philately, has fascinated hobbyists for more than 150 years.
When you buy stamps for your collection, you don’t have to look for the rarest, most expensive kind or go to auction houses such as Sotheby’s to find them. You can equally look up sellers on the Internet and rather than going for history, you could simply purchase runs of stamps from different countries. You’d be surprised by how these stamps can become historical relics. For example, anyone who purchased Iraqi stamps from the past two decades is probably now holding on to rare specimens from the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Similarly, some elderly people who collected stamps in their childhood during the 1930s are now the holders of some rare Nazi memorabilia – stamps from Hitler’s Germany. While not everyone would be too happy to have Hitler’s visage in their stamp album from many points of view, from the historical perspective it is quite interesting to see the postage stamps that were issued at that time in history and how something so mundane could be so horrifying. If you were to try to buy stamps from this time period, it would probably be very expensive to do so.
The same goes for limited editions from any country. If you buy stamps that were issued in honor of the Olympics, for example, you will find that in a few years it will be even more interesting to see who the sportsmen were that were honored by being depicted on these stamps. You may want to compare the stars of the last Olympics with the stars of the next one and see who is still active and who has retired. How well did the rising star of the last Olympics really do, and who is the champion this year that was a relative unknown last time?
You may also find that if you buy stamps from a certain country one year, later on that country might change its name. For example, if in the 1970s you bought stamps from Rhodesia, you will soon notice that there is no longer a Rhodesia because it is now Zimbabwe. Zaire is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma is Myanmar.
This is what makes philately so interesting, and why it is so worth it to buy stamps and preserve them. We never have time to sit down and log the changes in the history of the world around us. By collecting stamps, we create our own personal historical record that our children may well find fascinating. As we see from above, every stamp tells a story. It charts the rise and fall of political figures, royalty, dictators, and armies. Regimes rise and fall, as do dictators, and sportsmen and women succeed or fail. Yet letters continue to be sent, and life goes on, as does postage, which has managed to survive the Internet revolution. And the stamps in our album bear witness to the whole story.