Johnny's Box Part II: Stamps

Another of the collections from Johnny's Uncle Fred: A big bag stuffed with stamps. Like the matchbooks, these all appear to be from the 1960s-1980s.

Several sports-themed stamps.

Three stamps from the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair. I can think of one blogger for whom this might be quite relevant.

A variety of other stamps that caught my eye as just plain interesting. That 22 cent Love stamp I remember from my childhood; 22 cents are the oldest ones I remember using. Some other interesting subjects like Dinosaurs, New York, and the new Zip Code.

Lots of space-themed stamps.

A lot of the stamps were kept with the original postmark, which made them more interesting to me. A lot of them were postmarks from in and around Georgia, but here's one from the Grand Central Station post office. I used to mail card packages from there, though after a few years ago I switched to a less-crowded post office on 43rd Street, then started using the one by Penn Station. Now of course I mail them all out from Long Island.

I greatly enjoyed going through all of these stamps, spending hours going through them. However, I don't think this package is going to make a stamp collector out of me. Unlike matchbooks which provide a snapshot of their time, stamps are almost always backwards-looking, so they don't represent as well the time in which they were printed. If anyone collects stamps I'd be happy to send some or all your way - and if you have certain kinds of stamps you are interested in, I'm happy to look for some for you. (I think these were almost all domestic, a few Canada and Mexico/Latin America). 

The ones with the postmark were the most interesting to me, helping to give a sense of time and place. None were more evocative than this combination, a 1968 postmark with a Law and Order stamp.