Overview

Philately is more than just searching for rare stamps from the past or those with errors on them that weren't caught by inspectors. And it certainly isn't about putting them in a stamp album and forgetting about them. What gets me excited each day is learning about the country that issued the stamp and the subject that the stamp commemorates. In this book, I explore stamps from as far back as 1918, stamps from islands far away and nations on the other side of the planet. I share stamps with iguanas and the Tasmanian devil, birds and butterflies, a leopard that is no more and sea turtles that still roam the seas. For each stamp, I searched online to find out its date and specifications, then used an AI agent to find more facts and details to explore. I didn't just want to be a collector of pretty things, but a researcher, an investigator, a lifelong learner. For as much of my life as I can remember, I have always been curious, wondering why people do what they do, or why something matters to other people. So, I put to work a very talented online investigator, Claude AI by Anthropic, and together we dug through the internet in search of answers to my questions. The stamps you'll discover in these pages come in shapes you might never have imagined: triangles from Nicaragua celebrating cotton and from San Marino honoring philately itself, a perfect circle from Japan featuring Disney characters, and diamonds from Hungary commemorating sports stadiums. You'll encounter words in languages spanning the globe: Croatian and German, Arabic and Vietnamese, Spanish and Japanese, Cambodian and Romanian. Some stamps showcase humanity's creations, like sailboats gliding across Lebanese waters, bicycles racing around Hungarian tracks, Gothic churches rising from Barbuda's shores, and even a baseball bat ready for play. Others celebrate nature's gifts, like vibrant flowers on San Marino's triangular stamp, the grass and trees of tropical islands, and the vast ocean surrounding our world. We'll gaze up at the stars through a Maldives stamp depicting the constellation Capricorn, then look down at intricate snail shells on Papua New Guinea's shores. Each stamp is a window into a different corner of our remarkable world. Sometimes I was perplexed about one of my questions. Some just didn't want to yield themselves to the demands of inquiry, but I persevered. When Claude had trouble finding a particular stamp, I dug until I found it. When I couldn't translate Cambodian or German, Claude jumped at the task, though sometimes I just went to Google Translate. And best of all, when I would recognize an important topic deriving from a stamp, I would task Claude with helping me research until I felt that I had learned enough to make the adventure worth having. Thirty chapters and thirty adventures, each with new understandings of the people around the world across many generations. I hope that you enjoy my book. It is the first of many as I choose to be more than a person who looks at stamps. I want to be the philatelist who investigates the people, animals, places and events that have been commemorated for all time on little postage stamps. And if you come along with me on my journey, maybe you will see just how much fun it is to learn about stamps.

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