This week I dropped in at the Collectors Club (22 East 35th Street, Manhattan) where they were having a members' fav stamps display along with the Annual Business Meeting.
Lots of covers were displayed, including a set of US military covers from WWII (juxtaposed with post-war Chinese stamps, some bearing the image of Mao) that I liked a lot. Member George Slessinger put that one up, and other entries included post war German covers; I saw for the first time the Saxon imperfs used on a letter. These were only around for a short time along with the AM stamps that are also scarce on covers. An a very interesting display by the president of the club was from his mail fraud collection, focusing on a quack medical device. And of course there was at least one with a display of artistic stamps, which will be a later post by me.
Keith Harmer was in attendance, and with him a copy of a letter from 1795 that intimated that a British ship would arrive in the area now known as Guyana, then known as Demarara, and which, perhaps due to the presence of this ship, became British Guiana. We had been discussing the sale of stamps from this country as after the one penny magenta sold for a record $9.8 million at Sotheys last year, the rest of the collection of John E. du Pont was disposed of by an auction house in Europe which sold it to the Sheikh of Qatar, who passed away having only paid a fraction of the bid. Who owns the stamps now is a legal question to be decided on three continents. And of course it adds to the mystique.
British Guiana items are hot now, and getting back to that letter, it seems like an espionage item as the recipient, Hugh Calmont, was being advised to get all the cotton he could on board when the ship arrived; the writer, Mr Higgins, seemed privy to some inside information on this and knew of the alliance between France and the Dutch. Hearing these details, a man with a silver skull ring smiled and produced a much more modern letter, with some similar details but about thorium and tantalum. Both of these are metals that are useful to energy and communication respectively. The former is still in a research stage, but could replace uranium as a more environmentally friendly resource, with much attention being paid to it by the Chinese. In America, it is politically controversial, and politicians keep their staff under non-disclosure agreements when dealing with it.
As to tantalum, it is the essential metal for cell phones and computers. It could be mined in Greenland or in the DR Congo. In Greenland the weather is a factor, and in the latter country politics. Man, being more in control of politics than the weather, decided to mine it in the African nation and now there is an upcoming election; and forces in that country that have determined they will not let the incumbent stand a third term, but seek to replace him with the governor of Katanga.
And so who knows if at some future auction a cryptic 2015 letter written in Word and printed out on a standard computer will fetch a high price. Somewhere in the stamp world there must be a collector whose niche field is espionage related covers. If so, the Collectors Club will certainly be just the spot for them. And of course, for all kinds of other collectors - this was discussed at length in the meeting and expect the club to grow in membership in the coming years with all kinds of new events including field trips from local schools.
