STAMP COLLECTING:
The Rodney Dangerfield of hobbies
You can’t blame Craig Pinchen for being cynical.
Like many baby boomers faced with the realities of the digital age, the veteran stamp collector has come to the harsh realization that the passion he’s devoted his entire life to has become the Rodney Dangerfield of hobbies.
Not only does it get no respect, people barely know it exists.
“There’s just not enough sex and violence in it to interest kids,” notes the director of the 80-year-old Kitchener-Waterloo Philatelic Society, whose efforts to instil his passion in the next generation have been foiled at every turn.
“Nothing blows up. It’s not something you can do on your hand-held device with any ease.”
Pity the poor postage stamp, invented in the 1840s as an efficient, prepaid way of sending letters that didn’t burden the recipient with costs, adorned with colourful cultural markings that place them in time like rings on a tree.
“There’s a reference to it being ‘the quiet hobby,’ because you have 10 people sitting around a table all working on something,” says Pinchen, determined to spread the gospel despite doors repeatedly slammed in his face.
“There’s a little bit of chatter back and forth — ‘Hey, look at this’ ‘What do you think about that?’ It’s just like being in a library: everybody’s got their head down, looking at what’s in front of them. That’s part of the problem.”
Stamps have had a nice 180-year run, profiling kings and queens, animals and industry, and more recently, Indigenous leaders and cultural celebrations such as Diwali, before email and texting rendered snail mail — and with it, stamps — a thing of the past.
Pinchen’s interest in the tiny perforated stickers that adorn envelopes and postcards, in multicoloured regional hues, began when he was about seven or eight years old.
“I’ve been involved ever since. It just fascinated me as a kid, especially Canadian stamps. I’ve branched out from there.”
He gets immersed in it, he says, intrigued by postal history, cancellation marks that detail each stamp’s circuitous route from sender to recipient, and those, never sent, that remain as pristine as the day they were printed.
“When I get started working on stuff at my desk at home, I could be lost in what I’m doing for two or three hours and not even know time has gone by, because I’m just absorbed by what I’m doing,” says the retired lawyer.
“Other people would say ‘Get a life! What’s wrong with you? Why are you collecting these?’ But a lot of collectors will tell you the same story.”
Stamp collecting, sadly, is no different than other collecting pursuits from the predigital era — books, records, movie posters — abandoned once the internet kicked in.
A once great hobby usurped by time.
If there’s a reprieve in the offing, it’s not apparent to Pinchen.
“I’ve got a 16-year-old granddaughter,” says the determined 69year-old, who collected puckshaped Shirriff hockey coins and CFL trading cards as a kid in the ’60s.
“I tried to interest her when she was four or five years old and it didn’t go anywhere. I’ve got two kids who were interested when they were young because daddy did this and stuck with it for a couple of years. But then, as they got to 11 or 12, they completely lost interest.” He sighs.
“It’s a common complaint from collectors that their adult children aren’t interested, nor are their grandkids, nieces or nephews. So collections often end up just going to stamp auction houses.”
Like an entertainer reminiscing about the glory days of vaudeville, he recalls a night in 1991 — or maybe it was ’92 — when K-W’s Philatelic Society held a children’s night with riotous response.
“We had about 200 kids show up and it was just amazing,” he enthuses, remembering the good times.
“It was wall to wall bodies. And the funny thing was that some of the parents were more into it than the kids when they realized how many different topics and countries there were.”
Another sigh. “It’s just gone downhill from there. We really haven’t had a children’s program in the last 10 to 15 years. It’s just hard to get kids to come out.”
He had hoped, he says, to access elementary schools to spread the word, to expose young minds to the wonders of stamp collecting.
But for reasons that continue to elude him, those doors never opened.
“I can understand that, at all costs, you’ve got to protect the children,” he says, speculating on why school officials refuse to embrace philatelic club members into classrooms.
“You can’t let these weird unknown outside influences come in. But frankly, it feels like we’re treated like the junior Nazi club, rather than a stamp club.”
He said he sent a detailed letter to one school board trustee touting the educational merits of stamp collecting.
“Short of serial killers and psychopaths, there probably isn’t a topic you can come up with that isn’t reflected on stamps from somewhere in the world,” he says.
“Culture, history, geography, science, math — you name it, it’s on stamps.”
The school board’s response? “‘Thank you,’ ” he recites from memory. “‘Unfortunately, the areas of interest you point out in your email are not reflected in our curriculum as we have it today.’ ”
He pauses, incredulous. “I thought ‘What part of your curriculum? Science. Math? History? Geography? How is that not relevant? But that was the attitude. It was a terse, easy way of just saying ‘Get lost!’”
The tragedy, he says, is that as one stamp-less generation morphs into the next, kids won’t know what they missed.
“Many of them wouldn’t know what stamp collecting is all about, because they wouldn’t know what a stamp is,” he says.
“And if you mentioned a letter to them, they probably wouldn’t know what that is either.”
For a guy who embraces change, welcomes diversity and admits his 45-member club “is suffering from too many old white-haired guys, too few women and practically no interested children,” it’s a tough pill to swallow.
“It’s a cliché, but it is what it is and it makes me sad,” says Pinchen, who estimates his collection is worth between $5,000 and $10,000.
“But I’m not going to lose sleep over it or decide to end it all because my stamp collection isn’t going to carry on with anybody.”
Life, he says, will go on. “Since nobody in the family wants it, I’ve set out instructions about different auction places to approach with the idea of selling it.”
He pauses, reconsidering. “Or I might just donate it to the club.”
The Kitchener-Waterloo Philatelic Society hosts Stampfest 2024, which includes judged exhibits, stamp sales and free giveaways, on April 20 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Trillium Lutheran Church, 22 Willow St. in Waterloo. Admission and parking are free. For information, go to kwstampclub.org/stampfest.