Center Turns Into a Stamping Ground

Dave Kleinman collects stamps. But not any old stamps. The 58-year-old collector from Monterey looks for British Commonwealth stamps, especially those from the South Pacific.

Arcane? Maybe. But then there’s 46-year-old Steve Inklebarger, who cares less about the stamps than he does the postmark covering the stamps. Inklebarger has come to Anaheim’s World Stamp Expo 2000 in search of envelopes with postmarks issued by the Kingdom of Hawaii before the islands became part of the U.S.

By Sunday, about 125,000 people will have descended on the Anaheim Convention Center for the U.S. Postal Service show. A 10-day affair that ends at 6 p.m. Sunday, the expo features more than 200 dealers with many albums of stamps.

People want stamps in mint condition, stamps in deplorable condition, stamps with printing mistakes, all the stamps from one country, stamps with butterflies, stamps with flowers, stamps on their first day of issue, old stamps, used stamps and new stamps, said Vance Rightmire, a stamp dealer from Austin, Texas.

In an effort to expand the audience that enjoys stamp collecting, the expo also features exhibits to spark interest in the hobby.

Kids can design their own stamps and learn how to remove stamps from envelopes. Visitors can make Canadian or Australian vanity stamps--stamps with their own pictures on them. A NASA space exhibit complements six newly released sheets of space exploration stamps.

The space stamps illustrate how stamps are capable of beauty and education at the same time. One-dollar pentagonal stamps show colorful images of the sun; two $3.20 circular holograms have depictions of the international space station; a $11.75 hologram features the lunar lander; another hologram shows a moving picture of Earth from space; six 60-cent stamps depict telescopes used to study space, and four stamps have lively drawings by children solicited in a nationwide contest.

In describing why they love stamps, most collectors say the hobby offers a chance to learn about history and the world. Each stamp features a famous person, event or place, and each has its own history from its date and the circumstances of its issuance to its arrival in someone’s mailbox.

Anthony Dewey, 44, looks for Swiss stamps, but only those used by international agencies.

On Thursday, Dewey pored over dealers’ books. He pointed to a “label,” not a stamp because it has no price, issued by the Swiss government for the International Education Bureau to communicate with prisoners of war during World War II. He said the labels helped the agency keep track of how many letters went back and forth. “Stamps are documents of history,” he said.

The expo showcases the world’s rarest stamp, an 1868 1-cent stamp with a picture of Benjamin Franklin valued at $2.5 million. It’s the gridded pattern on the back of this stamp that makes it so valuable. Meant to prevent people from reusing stamps, the grid weakened the stamp’s fiber, and only two are known to have survived.

A 1918 stamp at the expo called the “inverted Jenny” is said to be the most famous stamp because of a printing mistake. A plane called the Curtiss Jenny was printed upside down on a 24-cent stamp. The stamp was discovered by William Robey, who bought 100 of them for $24 and subsequently sold them for $15,000. The stamps now sell for about $170,000 each.

“There are as many ways to collect stamps as there are stamps out there,” Rightmire said. “It’s a collecting bug.”

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Judy Silber can be reached at (714) 966-5988