PHILATELY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20828, 21 September 1929, Page 3

PHILATELY.

DUNEDIN CLUB. Tile monthly meeting of the Dunedin Philatelic Club was held in the YAI.C.A. on Thursday evening, Mr J. M’Ara presiding. The evening was spent in- the discussion of various ways and means >f collecting. In these days it is impossible to collect every stamp that is issued there are so many thousands at present, and the number of new issues is well over 1000 yearly. Many, if not most, of the early issues are now very scarce, and command such high prices, that the tyro’s purse cannot possibly cope with the situation. So at the present day the stamp collector has to look for smaller fields to conquer. It was the aim and object of the various speakers at the meeting to show what these fields were, to show the young (in collecting) some of the very many by-paths in stamp col-, looting. This, after all, is the fjreat charm of the hobby. It is so elastic as regards taste and pocket that anyone can find unbounded pleasure in its pursuit.

Mr M'Ara spoke on British colonial stamps as a field for the colletftor, Even here the group was such a large one\ that, without a very full purse, one could not hope to get anything like a complete collection, and it was therefore necessary atill further to restrict one’s range. One or several countries only could be the aim of the collector, or he might restrict himself to certain periods, such as the Victorian, Edwardian, or Georgian. Any one of these gave ample scope, and in the latter two one could collcst with the possibility of completeness, especially if minor' varieties of .shade and various perforations were ignored. Watermarks, on the other hand, must be collected, as they marked very definite periods in the history of the stamps. For the purpose of such collecting the catalogue issued by Messrs Whitfield King, of Ipswich, was an excellent guide. Mr M'Ara also advised the young collector to join a new issue .service. As an investment, he himself had found the scheme of great worth. In a large number of cases the money spent would now return many hundreds per cent, if he wished to realise on his collection. Mr Basil Howard* said that, in his opinion, the chief objection to the stereotyped methods of collecting was the bugbear of completeness; one's album was continually full of blanks that hit the eye and the soul, to eay nothing of the pocket.- When the blank was finally fllledj more often than not by a very rubbishly-looking stamp, how much better off was one? Then, again, many stamps were to-day issued with the sole object of gaining revenue from collectors. Many of these stamps wore pure rubbish, yet for the sake ot completeness in the album one felt obliged to buy them. He showed several sections from his own collection which he designated as a “go as you please ” collection. One was struck with the amount of annotation shown ia Mr Howard’s collection, sometimes as much as two or -three pages of type for one stamp. The speaker s»id that tie followed no hard and fast rule in collecting. He was therefore, <yiite, untroubled by blanks in his album, tor there were none. He collected only such stamps as pleased him. The range of colours such stamps might go through did not interest him in the slightest; what was of paramount importance was the story behind the stamp. Most stamps told a story, some of them very fascinating stories, indeed; and it was in the research needed to dig out the story that he got hie greatest pleasure. Dr Watt followed with a few words on type collecting. Such collecting took only one stamp of any one design, and so formed a collection of portraits, animals, birds, heraldry, etc. Or. again, one could take the method of production and collect only line-engraved stamps. So in the same way might countries o? periods be collected. The postal issues of any one country might be illustrated by a collection of the designs (types) used, and in this way the collection might contain only 20 or 30 stamps for the given country and ii ? om pl e i ;e > whereas, otherwise, taking all the many varieties of the said country, the collection would run into hundreds of stamps. Many of them would be quite unobtainable and consequently there would be many ugly gaps in the album. Another field was that of faeo value. An instance w'as given of a collection of stamps of Great Britain and the Colonies of the value of twopence-halfpenny only. Such a collection to-day would comprise about 500 to 600 stamps, all of them more or, less easy to obtain. The speaker quite agreed with Mr Howard that “ completeness ” was a great bugbear to the hobby. He himself, even in type collecting, collected only such stamps as pleased him, and poor productions had no place in his albums If one was not careful, however, the matter of writing up one’s stamps could be overdone, and it was a pity to make the stamp _subservient to the annotation, j In his opinion a sheet, of good stamps 'tastefully arranged with brief, though sufficient notes, was preferable to several pages of script illustrated by a single stamp. This, after all, showed how amenable the hobby was to individual taste This was the secret of its great popularity. It did not matter if one man collected one-way and another another way, nor did it matter a jot if one man’s way of collecting did not coincide with another’s ideas on the subject. Each got his enjoyment out of the hobby in his own way, and there .lay its charm. Regarding single issue specialism. Dr Watt mention three New Zealand stamps that were cheap, plentiful, and capable of giving the collector much pleasure in working up One was the Penny Universal with all its various papers; another the issue of 18D1 with the advertisement printed on the backs of the stamps by means of which the complete sheets could bo built up and, third, the Dunedin Exhibition stamps. On account,of the method of their production and the very numerous flaws in every stamp, it was quite a simple matter to rcplnte the sheets. Such schemes were intresting by-paths of the hobby.

Laeh of the speaker exhibited portions of their collections, illustrating the linos of which they were speaking. A discussion followed.