Author: Larry Nix

Although most philatelic libraries are primarily depositories for books, magazines, and archival collections. They often include some three dimensional postal-related artifacts in their collections. Dr. Frank R. Scheer, Curator  of the Railway Mail Service Library in Boyce, VA recently let me know about a terrific artifact the library just acquired for its collection.  It is a U.S. Mint Registered Mail crate for shipping gold to Ft. Knox during the 1930s. Frank indicated that he spent months trying to acquire the gold crate at a reasonable cost.  According to him, gold bars would have been placed inside the crate and then secured with a Treasury Department registered mail lock. His estimate is that it may have weighed about 500 pounds when loaded, so four burly men would likely have been lifting 125 pounds each, using two steel rods that clipped under the corner hooks. They were laid along the floor of a storage mail car, with an armed Railway Mail Clerk or Postal Inspector acting as a guard in the car en route. Frank is uncertain about how many cars were in a chartered train to Ft. Knox, but it may have been about 20. In any case it is definitely an interesting piece of history. As Frank notes the crate is essentially a three dimensional philatelic cover. Thanks Frank for sharing information about your new library acquisition.

Today is the 125th anniversary of the birth of John Boynton Kaiser (1887-1973), a librarian and a philatelist. Kaiser is one of many librarians who collect or have collected postage stamps. He was, however, one of the first to collect postage stamps which depict libraries and librarians. Kaiser had a successful career as a librarian which included serving as administrator of the Tacoma (WA) Public Library, the University of Iowa Libraries and Library School, and the Newark (NJ) Public Library. He served as librarian at Camp Knox, Kentucky during World War I. He was also a serious philatelist and received the Walter McCoy Award for Excellence in Philatelic Writing from the American Philatelic Congress in 1953. The award was for his article Bibliography: The Basis for Philatelic Research which was published in the 1953 Congress Book (note: this article was also reprinted as a separate publication by the Philatelic Library Association in 1953). In the July, 1955 issue of Library Journal, Kaiser wrote an article titled “Librarianship and Philately” in which he introduced the library community to the collecting of postage stamps related to libraries and librarians that has since been called “bibliophilately”. Kaiser’s article in the Library Journal also makes note of many “parallelisms” between librarianship and stamp collecting. As a bibliophilatelist myself, I appreciate Kaiser’s early efforts to identify postage stamps related to libraries. A much broader approach to bibliophilately was written about by Leona Rostenberg in a series of articles in 1977 for the American Philatelist. Those articles were later published as a book titled Bibliately in 1978 by the American Philatelic Society (search for “Bibliately” in the APRL online union catalog to find philatelic libraries with this book). I discovered bibliophilately via a 1982 article by George Eberhart titled “Biblio-philately” in the magazine American Libraries.  I have established a webpage on “Bibliophilately Resources” for those who would like to explore this topic further. 

David Beech, Curator and Head of the Philatelic Collections at the British Library, provided the following information about a philatelic first. 

“In February, Michael Sefi, the Keeper of The Royal Philatelic Collection, visited the British Library Philatelic Collections. The occasion for his visit was to bring together the only three known Mauritius “Ball” envelopes, one from the Royal Philatelic Collection, one from the British Library’s Tapling Collection, and one that is currently on loan to the British Library that belongs to Mr. Vikram Chand. The “Ball” covers are so called because they each bear an example of the Mauritius 1847 “Post Office” issue 1d orange-red and are understood to have been used to send invitations or admittance cards for a Ball being given by Lady Gomm the wife of the Governor at Government House, Port Louis on 30th September 1847. This is the first time that all three surviving Ball covers have been together in the same place.”

A closer view of the Mauritius Ball cover in the British Library’s Tapling Collection.

On a reecent Southwest trip my wife and I were able to visit the Postal History Foundation complex in Tucson, Arizona.  On our visit we were treated to a personalized tour of the library building by Charlotte Cushman, the librarian, and a tour of the main Foundation building by Paul Nelson.  The Peggy J. Slusser Memorial Philatelic Library was of particular interest to me. It is housed in its own building which was designed specifically as a philatelic library. I am not aware of another instance in which this has occurred.  The building was designed by architect Les Wallach and dedicated in 1996. It is one of 40 libraries in the U.S. featured in the book Architecture for the Books by Michael J. Crosbie which was published in 2003.  In addition to its book and periodical collection devoted to philately, the library has an extensive collection of materials related to the Civil War. I wrote an earlier post about the Postal History Foundation and the Slusser Library, and it was really great to see this organization and its facilities in person. More photos follow.