Interesting Hobbies NEW METHOD OF STAMP COLLECTING

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 172, 17 April 1937, Page 3 (Supplement)

Interesting Hobbies NEW METHOD OF STAMP COLLECTING

Pen Friends Help RECORD OF INTERESTING PLACES AND PEOPLE Au album that is not only a repository for stamps but. a record of interesting places and people as well, is the proud possession of a New Plymouth woman. Stampcollecting is one of the most popular of hobbies, ami large sums are regularly paid for rare stamps or for I specimens which have been defaced or ! misprinted. Such as these bring joy to the heart of the philatelist and a glint of cupidity to his eye. But how much more valuable to him are the stamps of the philatelist who prizes them not so much for their intrinsic worth as for the vistas of far lands which they bring to the mind? The envelopes on which they came contain informative letters from all corners of the globe, and thus the collection is doubly valuable. Indeed, two hobbies are combined in one. “la Iso collect post-marks,” writes one such enthusiast, a woman, “confining myself to unusual names or countries.” Anyone, she says, cat? collect mint copies of stamps, and many of her friends have collections of the stamps of most countries. These are as up-to-date as possible, but they do not possess the fascination which her pen-friend letters give her. Her correspondents are exclusively people leading lives the reverse of hum-drum. “Pride of place must be given to my Alaskan pen-friend, who is a prospector and also a postmaster in that far corner of the world,” she says. “He has not seen a train for 12 years,

and it was so cold when he last wrote that his typewriter froze. A blizzard had been raging for three weeks. “My next pen-friend is a cowboy on an Arizona ranch, right on the border of Mexico. He mentions that it is very lonely on the range and that my letters and the New Zealand magazines that I send are very welcome. “Another pen-friend lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia. She is a school teacher and writes most interesting letters about her part of the Empire. I have also a German penfriend who is at present trading round the cost of South America, and who visited New Zealand a few years ago. lie was in the German submarine service during the Great War, and was a member of the crew of the Deutschland, the underseas cargo boat which evaded the Allies’ blockade and succeeded in reaching America and returning to Germany. This man was also on the submarine which landed Sir Roger Casement off the coast of Ireland on that perilous mission that ended with his death in the Tower.

“This particular pen-friend would be a ‘find’ for any journalist, • if he would only talk, but the war hurt him too much. The culminating point came in 1917, when those In the submarine came back to Kiel to find (as he says) the Red Flag flying and the Kaiser gone.

“Still another pen-friend is in the Royal Scots Greys on the north-west frontier of India. He sends interesting stamps and snapshots. A member of the Japanese Mercantile Marine trading round the west coast of Africa is another regular correspondent. This Japanese boy I met in Auckland, when he was on the training ship Shintoku Manj.”

[“The Dominion” will be pleased to hear from other readers who find pleasure in interesting and

unusual hobbies.]