Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposium at the National Postal Museum in Washington, DC.
If you’ve read my introduction in the most recent issue (3rd quarter 2010) of the Philatelic Literature Review, you know I’m not a stamp collector — but thanks to the symposium, I have my first stamp.
Steven Rod started off his presentation (“The Case of Thirty-five Esthetic and Political Messages: the Famous Americans of 1940”) by handing everyone in the audience a card with a Famous American stamp mounted on it. He paired us up, and had us talk about our stamp with a partner.
I was neither a stamp collector nor a historian, and my partner was from Denmark, but we nevertheless had an engaging conversation about the stamps’ designs.
Steven then began his talk about the stamps, shedding light on the issues we had discussed.
I was not the only non-collector in the room — the symposium drew a mixed crowd of philatelists, historians, museum professionals, and at least one librarian. Steven’s introduction got us all talking to each other.
At the end of his talk, Steven invited us to keep the stamps, which were duplicates from his collection: “For those of you who are not collectors, this can be your first stamp.”
Steven’s slides can be downloaded in PDF format from the symposium website.
Perhaps we can turn you into a stamp collector – there are many pythons-on-stamps. But you’d need to be careful not to have pythons on your pythons-on-stamps.
Tara – thank you so much for this post! Happy Stamp Collecting! — Steven (Rod) 🙂 🙂
Congratulations on your first stamp, Tara, and on the successful launch of the APRL blog!