Consider the following, which appeared in the December 14, 1952 edition of the Sunday New York Times: “Philatelists, an impatient species in the hobby world, are prone to consider attention to their demands as one of their own special human rights.”

So wrote Kent Stiles, who from 1937 until his death in 1961 wrote a weekly “News of the World of Stamps” column that appeared in the Sunday Times.

Stiles’ dig at collectors came in an article focused on the fact that, as his article opened, “clockwork efficiency and precision achieved on the basis of experience enabled the United Nations Postal Administration to solve last week a problem posed by American and foreign collectors of stamps and “first-day” issue of covers.” The problem, he went on to explain was when the UM began issuing stamps in 1951, demand was so great that “many collectors had to wait months before the deluge of advance mail orders could be filled. (These presumably included the UN’s first four airmail stamps issued on December 14, 1951, which together make up today’s #stampoftheday.)

Let’s ruminate on this for a minute-because there are at least two things about the article that I find striking. First of all, from the perspective of 2020, it seems amazing that for decades, the Times had a weekly column devoted to the issuance of new stamps, not only from the United States but also from around the world. I’m not sure whether someone wrote the column before Stiles took it on but I do know that it ran until 1993 when the Times discontinued the Hobby page where it ran.

Second, I’m struck by the fact that responding to an unexpectedly large demand for stamps was among the many problems that UN had to address in 1952 (a year, by the way, when the Korean War was still being fought). Both the column and the UN’s stamp issue show that stamp collecting, which today is a fading hobby mainly pursued by people older than I am (and I’m not young), was once an amazingly ubiquitous hobby practiced by people who cared deeply about their collections.

Consider, for example, Stiles’ description of what happened at the UN the week before his column appeared, when the UN issued today’s #stampoftheday, 3-cent and 5-cent stamps commemorating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which together are a bonus #stampoftheday for today. He explained that following the advice of the acting postmaster for New York City (who had experience responding to the demand for new stamps), the UN postal administration, which normally had 21 people to fill orders, hired 20 additional workers.

“Part of the clerical staff went to work at midnight on Tuesday,” Stiles reported. “At that hour, scores of dealers in the metropolitan area descended upon the philatelic agency room in the basement of the Headquarters Building. For ninety minutes they bought mint sheets by the thousands. These they took to their offices or homes and began applying the stamps to clients’ covers, which they brought back and posted early on Wednesday at the post office, which the United States Post Office Department operates for the United Nations.”

He continued: “Throughout Wednesday this post office, normally in a “restricted area” not accessible to the public was opened to all comers and long queues formed at the windows to purchase the new stamps….Similar activity was in progress from 9 A.M. until dusk at the postal counter…in the public lobby of the near-by General Assembly Building. The day brought thousands of added visitors intent on buying stamps and placing them on envelopes they had brought with them.”

While the UN officials figured out logistics, in 1955, as Stiles wrote in another column, they “got a sharp lesson in the intense and widespread interest in stamp collecting” when it prepared a special “souvenir sheet” to mark the organization’s 10th anniversary on October 24, 1955. About 200,000 copies of the sheets, which were printed in England, were sent to New York – a supply that turned out to be wholly inadequate and so, in the words of the Times headline, “U.N. Decennial Souvenir Completely Sold Out”.

Stiles described the scene: “Collectors who stormed the U.N. post office were at first permitted to buy as many as twenty-five sheets each. This maximum was soon cut to 10. By 1 p.m. the stock was exhausted. Literally thousands of collectors were sent away disappointed.” He added that Reider Tveldt, head of the U.N. Postal Administration, told the Times that the U.N. had ordered 10,000-to-15,000 more sheets. According to Stiles, Tveldt also pleaded “in a letter to collectors for ‘indulgence, patience and goodwill’ and promised that “all orders will be processed as soon as the stock is available.”

It also appears that my father, who was never shy about making his voice heard, wrote to U.N. officials to complain about the premiums that dealers were charging for U.N. stamps. At least that’s what I surmise because his U.N. stamp album includes a letter that Tveldt sent him on October 11, 1955 just before the souvenior sheet debacle. After explaining that he was responding to an enquiry my father sent in late September, Tveldt wrote: “The United Nations has no control over the prices set by stamp dealers for United Nation’s postage stamps.”

He added, presumably in response to a query from my father, “I am afraid that we do not sell [postage] meter imprints to collectors, these being used only for official mail of the United Nations.” (My father also collected postage meter imprints from as many places as possible.) “However,” Tveldt added, “I have requested that this letter to you be franked with a meter imprint presently in use.”

This must have been really special because my father kept both the letter and the envelope.

All of this makes me realize that while I don’t fully understand what it was about stamps that hooked my father – and so many others, I can appreciate the passion they brought to their obsession.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, offer “indulgence, patience and goodwill,” and work for peace.