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Philatelic Philter

Se Tenant or Not?

By William AltmannPublished 3 years ago 12 min read
2

John had worked at the Federal Mint for twenty years. He’d started sweeping floors as a teenager, then moved up to helping the electricians, mechanics and carpenters repair the machines. Those latter years brought him all over the printing plant, to every machine and every trade. The old timers were uniformly pleasant, greeting him as he lugged two heavy toolboxes, walking behind whoever he was assisting that day. They enjoyed seeing a young man with energy and ambition – a hard worker.

The printing plant did not make currency. That was in Philadelphia, and a few other cities, and the security there was intense. John’s first two years had been in a currency printing house, but all the stress and oversight got to him. So, he applied for and was awarded a job at the philatelic printing plant. Even when he started, he found it fascinating. The paper products were so much more colorful than the dull, green money printed in the big city. The machines were smaller and there were more of them, probably because the print runs were smaller. When the government published more than forty stamp varieties annually, it kept a lot of machines busy. Throughput didn’t matter as much as speed in changing over the plates and inks from one issued stamp to another. The skills involved in such machinery changes played to John’s strengths, so he was noticed and moved ahead readily.

John took his fascination home with him. He had a ground floor, one bedroom flat in the poorer section of town. It wasn’t that the job didn’t pay well – it did. It was more that John saved his money. He didn’t go out, he didn’t vacation, he didn’t buy expensive things for himself or for anyone else. John had his dreams, and those dreams would require a good sized savings account.

Without friends, and with family far away, John gravitated to a quiet hobby. The weather in this part of the country did not lend itself to outdoor pursuits for probably six months of the year, so without anyone in the flat with him he needed to occupy his time and relax between long work days. The hobby he chose was a natural. John went to the downtown five-and-dime and bought a stamp collecting album. It was not expensive. He actually bought an entire kit, complete with stamp hinges, a thin paper pamphlet describing how to get started, and even a nice pair of electroplated stamp tongs. The clerk was happy to help. He was probably eighty years old if he was a day, and not many people came in anymore to buy things to do with philately.

“It’s great to see someone as young as you takin’ an interest in stamps,” he said as he rang up the purchase on a cash register which was likely as old as he was as cashier. He had a nice smile smeared on his scratchy face. “You oughta think about comin’ to our stamp club. We meet once a month on Tuesday nights at seven, at the VFW Post on Central.” He sounded to John like he was asking a friend out for a date!

“Well, I’ll see…” John replied. Other than work, he was not used to associating with people, particularly on a social level. But, hey, how difficult could it be if everyone there was as ancient as this old man?

And so started John’s pastime with postage stamps. He didn’t mention it to anyone at work because the management frowned on philately as a hobby among the workers. “Too much temptation,” they said. There was the risk – and there were historical examples – of how workers had walked off with new issue stamps, or had intentionally created ‘error’ stamps and spirited them out of the building. Such a trick could be a profitable enterprise. Error stamps were prized among serious collectors, and one such stamp, like the “Inverted Jenny”, could fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction. Then there was the example of the United Nations commemorative US stamp in the Sixties. At first, only a couple of inverted color sheets had escaped the presses. Since the machines applied only one color at a time, the sheets had to be transferred from one machine to the next to create finished stamps. One brave soul had reversed the direction of two sheets before putting the stack of partially-completed stamps into the next machine, and the yellow image was upside down. When the Post Office learned of it, they ruined the value of the ‘error’ stamps by intentionally printing an equal number of proper and inverted copies and selling them all as ordinary stamps through the postal system. Ah well, another fortune missed.

But other than the riskiness perceived by Post Office and printing house management, stamp collecting was pretty tame hobby. Unless you counted paper cuts, there was little danger in it, and no real money to be made in the short term. Only if you had an amazingly complete collection and sold it would you bring home any cash. John enjoyed it, and it fit in with his personality and lifestyle, and the types of weather in Pennsylvania, whether cold and snowy, or warm and humid.

***

John worked hard. He saved his money. The months went by, each with its own season. John got to know a few of the people at the stamp club. They were mostly old enough to be his mother or father, but it passed the time. And they introduced him to the dynamic, exciting aspects of philately!

The more he listened to their tales of pen pals and exchanging postcards with people from other countries, the more he wanted to go to those places. But then something else came into the conversation: error stamps. This was a topic he knew something about. It started small, just chatting with one other member. But word began to get around, and soon John had an audience. People wanted to know all about how stamps are printed, how errors are occasionally made, what the printing company does about them, and so on. It was one of those arcane corners in an otherwise, let’s face it, pretty boring hobby.

After the initial explanations from John to the others in the club, during which he discovered two collectors who actually had error stamps – oh so carefully guarded – in their collections, the excitement died down. Maybe it was their nature to be unable to sustain an excited pitch long-term. Maybe they were drawn back to discussing postmarks and overprints, watermarks and paper types.

Then, Amanda came to the meeting. She was older than John, he guessed, but not old enough to be his mother. Maybe a sister? She was a collector, and some of the oldies knew her. It turned out that she had been traveling, yes traveling, to many of those remote countries, purchasing stamps at post offices around the world. She came to the meeting with a briefcase full of sheets of beautiful postage, and she was happy to carefully separate stamps all evening long, sharing them, trading them, bringing smiles to anyone who asked.

John was one of those smiling. She had noticed him, of course, soon after entering the room. She thought, “He’s not old enough to be my father! Maybe a younger brother? That’d be okay.” When she came around to his part of the room, he lamely asked her if she had any of those Russian stamps left and would she be willing to share. John actually used his inventive streak and pulled from his extras book two se tenant pairs of U.S.’s Apollo-Soyuz docking capsule space stamps from 1975.

“I’ve been saving these for awhile, and it seems like a good time to offer them as trade,” he said.

“Well, how about these in exchange?” Amanda replied, from her case she pulled a glassine envelope. Inside was a se tenant pair of the nearly-identical U.S.S.R. stamp, commemorating the same event! And, in the a larger envelope, the souvenir sheet that went with it!

John could not believe his luck. He’d heard about the Soviet stamps, designed in the same layout but with Cyrillic printing and rubles instead of cents. They were neither rare not especially valuable, but they made an excellent addition to his so-far-only-U.S. collection.

“Thank you!” was all he could say. He carefully pulled his small, black stock book from his vest pocket, and slipped both glassine envelopes inside. He did not want to trust them to the rows of folds where he’d already stuffed a few traded items. In his enthusiasm, John forgot his usual shyness.

“Can you write down your address and phone number?” he asked Amanda. “I think we can do some serious trading.” He looked up and smiled.

“Sure,” she said, then added, “and I have a project I’d like to discuss with you. Can you come over tomorrow evening?”

“Wednesday? Um, yeah. I get off work at 5:30… “ he glanced down at her address “...so I can bring dinner with me and get to your place by 7:00? Do you like Thai? I think pizza is a bad combination with stamp trading.”

“Wow! Exactly what I was thinking,” Amanda said. Then she turned to go, but looked back over her shoulder. “See you tomorrow. Call me if anything comes up.” She smiled. He smiled back.

***

The next evening went smoothly from the beginning. The Thai food stayed hot. They enjoyed it while chatting about her travels and a bit about his work.

“I heard you’ve been giving talks at the club about stamp printing and even about how errors are tracked,” she ventured.

“Yeah. It’s about all I can contribute, since I’m still new at this. The people seem interested.”

“Oh sure. They’ll soak up anything to do with stamps. But, hey, listen. I want to tell you a story and then suggest an idea. You can tell me at the end if you think it could work.”

“Uh, okay,” John muttered. He could not predict where this was headed.

Amanda told him of her travels in Eastern Europe. She’d been to many of those countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union. When the U.S.S.R. fell apart in 1991 those republics became independent. They wanted their own currencies and their own postage stamps. Like many small or struggling Third World countries, currency was essential and stamps gave their claim to independence some legitimacy. But of course, they did not have their own currency and philatelic printing houses.

“This is where the story gets interesting,” Amanda went on. “These countries contract with printing houses elsewhere in the world to get their stamps printed. The paper, the inks, the plates – it’s all made outside the country, printed, then shipped in. The company makes money, the republics … er, the countries get stable and good quality products … everybody’s happy.

“But these are ordinary printing companies. They are not government-owned. Their processes and quality control is nowhere near what you have here in the U.S., where you work. So, things happen…”

John’s eyes became wider.

“Sometimes some materials get out of the printing house undetected. This doesn’t happen with currency, probably because it’s carefully counted, serialized, and then counted again at the receiving end. But stamps? Did you know that many of these countries, like the U.S.S.R. before them, made more revenue – and far more profit – by selling the stamps internationally to collectors than through their own postal systems? I mean, the people didn’t have the cash to spend on stamps. They didn’t even know people outside their town or village, never mind overseas – at least most of them. And who had the extra income to devote to philately?

“So the government created Cancel-To-Order, or ‘CTO’. You’ve seen them in people’s collections at the club. The stamps are cancelled but never wetted – never affixed to an envelope and used as postage. With the cancel, they’re useless anymore as postage, but as postal paper they’re desirable by collectors and clubs around the world. So, the printed stamps go out into people’s hands. Everyone is happy.”

John’s mouth was dry from hanging open. “Is there more?” was all he could say.

“Yes. Remember I said quality control isn’t as good? Well, I’d like to propose that we work together with a couple of people I met over there. As a team, we can arrange for, collect, deliver and then sell error stamps we smuggle out of their printing company. The sheets can go out with orders of CTO stamps. No one will detect them – the sheets are counted by machine, but not optically scanned to find inverted colors or missing colors or mis-registrations. We’d have to keep the numbers small, to make things valuable enough for the effort, but I think it’s worth a try.”

“How much value are we talking about?” John asked. His heart was pumping. He could not take his eyes off of Amanda, although his motivation had changed.

“With just a couple of sheets a month, we can each make ten thousand dollars, maybe even twenty thousand dollars, in just six months. We’d have to hide the stamps away for a year or more before bringing them back out in front of collectors. But an ordinary safety deposit box would be fine. Warm, dry and dark – that’s all those bad boys will need.”

“Twenty thousand dollars?” John sat back on the sofa cushion. He thought back over the week. He’d met Amanda the evening before. She’d traded stamps with him. He’d put them in his little, black stock book. Then the next evening he’d brought dinner here. And they’d ‘talked’.

He looked at Amanda. She was finished speaking. She’d told her tale and made her offer. Now she was waiting for his reply.

Slowly, ever so slowly. The warmth he’d felt from being close to her through dinner and the talk dissipated. It was replaced by a growing chill, not in his bones, but in his guts. He still hadn’t answered her, but that was because he realized: he didn’t have a choice anymore.

Unable to say “No”, not allowed by her to say “No”, John tried his hardest to think about the twenty thousand dollars, and hoped it would melt the ice in his guts.

fiction
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About the Creator

William Altmann

I've been an engineer. It's provided me with travel to many places and stories of people. That, with my passion for history, have given me many stories to write. And I do love to tell stories! I have written 17 books since early 2020.

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