IMAGE AND SUPERSCRIPTION
By HAROLD MATTINGLY
NOT very Jong ago a regular contributor to The Spectator un- burdened himself of his feelings on the subject of stamp- collecting, and was rather severely handled in consequence by ardent philatelists. Sincere as he obviously was, he seemed to me to be asking for trouble. For the fact that I can see nothing in a subject cannot be used to prove that you will not be able to,.and this whole business of collecting refuaes to come under purely logical analysis. After it has been conclusively demonstrated that there is no justi- fication for a special type of collecting, one may still find the same unreasoning delight in it. It is simplest to admit that there is in many people a kind of instinct that finds satisfaction in collecting, that the subject may vary almost infinitely with individual taste, and that, as long as nothing guilty or unpleasant is involved, the collector may claim, at the least, a general toleration. The collector himself, of course, who is seldom. as foolish as others may take him to be, will readily find latisfactory explanations of his own conduct. He is acquiring expert knowledge of a subject that interests him—or, perhaps, he is making a sound investment Of his money. But with- out that strong underlying instinct—a variation, no doubt, of the instinct to hunt something—the number of collectors would assuredly not be large.
The postage-stamp belongs to a very modern phase of civilisation. It has only about a century of life behind it_ The coin, on the other hand, goes back some two and a half millennia. As early as about 650 B.C. round discs of metal were already being struck for use as currency on the coast of Asia Minor, while the Far East inde- pendently made the same invention not very much later. Since that early date, wherever civilised man has gone, the coin has gone too. Every country that has made its mark in history has left us the
metallic record of its economic and political life ; many of the great men who have written their names on the roll of fame have left us their portraits and titles to remember them by. When we reflect that the coin has frequently been more than a mere medium of exchange, that it has had the quality of a medal and given expression to religious belief and political purpose, that it has been a favourite vehicle of artistic inspiration, we shall not be surprised to find that it has had a steady attraction for the great body of collectors. It seems, in fact, an almost perfect object for their quest.
How is it, then, that its appeal is not even wider than it actually is? How is it that for every one collector of coins there may. be as many as a thousand of postage stamps? It is not just a matter of expense. The metal .coin, it is true, has always some intrinsic value, however small, while the stamp has almost none. But the rare stamp reaches heights never yet reached by any coin—and that although it lacks the great artistic and historical interest of the finest coins. And, we may add, rarity can be conferred on a stamp by causes almost purely accidental. A chance mistake in colour or design, an accidental inversion of letters, may give an extraordinary value to a stamp otherwise quite ordinary. In the case of coins, such whims of chance seldom attract much attention. 1 hey are treated on their merits as matters of minor importance.
We are still left asking why the stamp has an appeal to collectors so much more general than that of the coin. It is not really hard to guess the reasons. They are, it seems, two in number. In the first place, stamps are in plentiful supply ; new issues are continually appearing ; every little town has its one shop or more where stamps may be bought. The collector need never fear that there will be lack of stamps to buy or dealers to sell to him. The case, indeed, would soon be altered if collectors gave their serious attention to the collection of modern coins as they appear. But up to now there has been a kind of unwritten convention that the interest of coins lies in the past. Not that there is any real dearth of the older coins. But coins are liable to wear, and, in the case of all but goleto decay. The collector likes his objects to be fresh and agreeable to the eye, and turns in aversion from the coins that bear too plainly on them the marks of their. long history. It is always possible that things may change ; that modern coinage may begin to attract collectors, and that dealers may spring up to deal with the new demand. At the moment, I believe, America is the only country in which the trade in modern coinage really flourishes. For the time, the case is as I have stated. Only the older coins are much collected, and they are not readily to be met with outside a very few channels.
There is a second disadvantage to the collection of coins which is, I believe, even more decisive. The coin, in contrast to the stamp, is a heavy object, difficult to store conveniently, awkward to handle and move. Where a single bound volume will harbour the stamps of a whole country, a similar set of coins will require a large and expensive cabinet to house it. If this difficulty could once be sur- mounted, an immense increase in coin-collecting might be anticipated. Cardboard albums, specially designed to receive special sets of coins, with compartments cut to the right size and covered with cello- phane, might make coins relatively easy to store -and carry. A development of such albums—already well advanced in America— might lead to a great development in the whole pursuit of . numismatics.
If we are thinking of the growth of interest in modern coins, there is another point that now arises. Metallic currency has a great history behind it, but the present, and even more the future, seem to belong rather to paper money. Already the bank-note and the cheque perform many functions once performed by metal, and it is easy to foresee a time when the comparatively clumsy use of heavy coins will be almost obsolete. It would seem to be only reason- able, then, that the collector should also turn his attention to this new trend, and, not content with gathering the objects that have facilitated exchange in the past, should concentrate on those more convenient objects that are gradually taking their place. Up to now collectors of paper money have been few, but there are great possibilities in view, and if collection of this new type ever becomes common, it will run on lines very similar to the collection of postage stamps, and will come under much the same laws.
Prophecy about anything as uncertain as the Vagaries 'of the collecting instinct is, in the nature of things, hazardous. But it looks as if the essential attraction is here present, and, that once granted, it is the easiest thing in the world to find very good reasons for doing what one finds oneself predisposed to do.
Previous page
