The Hobby of Kings
Of all the unlikely things that Man has ever hunted or gathered over the years, the humble Postage Stamp has always been the most respectable evidence of a disreputable pastime. Despite the common belief that they are friendless lunatics or just some consumption junkies on a burn, a true Collector is an Artist. Carefully they put together each piece of their little puzzle in the hope that one-day it might just all fit perfectly together into one complete picture. Perfection can be a cruel and unforgiving Mistress, so easily misunderstood. A collection really only makes sense when you see it as the story of the Collector, and a collection is only every really valuable when it’s a good story and enjoyable to listen to, not just something worth holding in your hand.
The idea that some long lost relative of yours has tucked away a stamp collection in some well-hidden box marked “Stamps” has been the driving force behind many a big attic clear-out and the obligatory Post Garage Sale. I can honestly say the chances that any homemade stamp collections, based on the stamps that happened to come your way (or your grandfathers way, or his mates way), is of any value whatsoever, is as likely as you producing gold-wrapped chocolate bars from your nose. Slight to Zero.
Stamp collections found in boxes marked “Stamps” are never worth more than the paper they are printed on. Even if you have had a half-hearted attempt at sticking them in some obviously irrelevant order (like country or color) to semi-stiff sheets of paper, with that special glue you bought in the local bookshop that comes off the back of stamps like sun-warmed dung off a ice-cooled shovel.
It doesn’t matter what you do with the “Stamps” because of the simple fact, “this is Not Your Collection”, so you will be ripped off, like a well-stuck band-aid from a sensitive (and hairy) body-part, by the first half-decent Philatelist, that has the fortune to wonder past your little Garage Sale. The problem is not only your pitiful non-existent knowledge of Stamps, but also the fact that everyone will be telling you all number of lies like, ”this crap (i.e. your Stamp Collection) is worthless”. That is the hardest one of the lies to crack open because it is the truth; a valuable collection is worth nothing in the hands of a fool. As every good Philatelist knows the best way to lie is to always stick to the truth.
Have you ever bothered to look at a stamp?
Have you ever held it under a magnifying glass in the hope to see more?
Most of you haven’t and I have no doubt that the humble stamp will soon pass into the realms of forgotten history, nothing more than a colored bit of paper stuck to an empty envelope. There are times when a stamp can say more than the thousand words once written and stuck into those now empty old envelops, there are even times when a stamp can point an accusing finger from the grave at the murdering hand that once held the pen or knife.
Philately is a small world, but it conceals an even smaller world. A secretive little world that allows few to pass through its electrically powered gates and even fewer to join its exclusive rank and file, The Grand Order of Stamp Makers. Here you will find a old fashioned world, a world of history and tradition, a subterranean World with rat holes running criss-cross though the dimly lit tunnels that are guarded by the likes of Dragon 2.1 (computer-coded doors), night and day, day and night. A dwarf World where fortunes can be made with just a slip of the hand, a world where Truth and Fantasy can, and often do, get mixed up with each other into a stew of paper and paint (more often light-hardened plastic pigmentation nowadays). Stamp Design & Production departments of National Postal Services around the World are highly endangered “Hobby & Collectable”-suppliers to the Monarchies and Monaco’s in this day and age, where even “Royal pastimes” can and do, just disappear into thin air.
There are many reasons why things are best-left hidden, tucked away in dusty draws, but if you do accidentally happen to stumble over some secret marked “Private”, then you are well advised to leave it right alone. People like their secrets kept safe-hands. Even the secrets that they hide in broad daylight, right in front of your face, because the secrets that stay kept are the ones we don’t dare to care about.
The Hotel E-10 must surely be is one of the least attractive buildings situated inside the Artic circle, it lacks charm and grace, the low budget facilities leaves one feeling cheated out of any reasonable expectancy. But on the other hand it is by far the closest place to stay if you want to be in walking distance of the Kiruna offices of the Swedish Postal Stamps department. Swedish postage stamps are designed and printed in Stockholm and then they are transported to the Artic circle, to the mining town of Kiruna, for “collector” preparation and distribution. During the summer months the sun never sets in Kiruna, making day light robbery a 24-hour option. How many times had he sat waiting in the nondescript rooms for sleep to relieve the boredom of the view? There was the two view options that the E-10 had to offer, the parking area at the front of the building that looked out over the petrol station or the empty area at the back that looked out over a warehouse that seemed to serve no particular purpose. The front view did offer the added bonus of on clear days you could see part of the mining mountain behind the petrol station that produced the fabulous iron ore. As of yet, counting this visit, it was his fourth stay at the Drive in Bar Hotel E-10.
Postage Stamps and Paper money are essentially printed by using the same rather antiquated technique, recess printing or intaglio, a technique that requires hand-made original engravings. The original “unique engravings” are priceless and well guarded objects. The recess printing process makes duplication virtually impossible, unless you happen to have the required extremely expensive, printing equipment, years of qualified experience and an original engraved “die” which is truly impossible to duplicate and therefore forever unique in the mass production of Stamps. The major difference between stamps and cash money is that each bill is individually numbered where as Postage stamps are numbered in arks or Cylinder identification digits.
Czeslaw Slania (pronounced Chess-wav Swan-ya) was born in Czeladz, Poland in 1921. At the age of six, he and his family moved to Lublin. Even as a small boy, he had demonstrated a great talent for drawing and even the production of miniature engravings. The German occupation of Poland during the Second World War, gave Slania the opportunity to develop his skills and become a professional counterfeiter; He could reproduce any official document with just a fine-brush and the right colored ink or water paint. He even forged postcards with hand painted stamps that fooled the postal services and got “date-stamped” like any other real stamp. At the end of the war Czeslaw enrolled into the Krakow School of Fine Arts, to go straight as it were. He was employed by the Polish Government Printing Works and engraved his first stamp for Poland in 1951. The aftermath of WWII had left Poland under Soviet Communist control, which was not the most pleasant of environments even for the most faithful of government workers. He left for Sweden in 1956, maybe the Poles didn’t mind losing their most talented engraver, or maybe the documents allowing him foreign travel weren’t as real as the authorities would have liked, who knows? After a few years of not being able to get honest employment in the Socialist paradise of Sweden, Slania finally got a job as a full time engraver in 1960 for Swedish Postal Service. Slania had actually engraved his first stamp for Sweden in 1959 while not “fully” employed, as a kind of test thing they did in the fifties, but he liked it in the Swedish Postal service and even ended up engraving his 1000th stamp in Sweden in the Millennium year 2000 AD. He was appointed as the Royal Court Engraver of Sweden and of Denmark and also to his good friends the Royal family of Monaco; Movie star princesses make lovely stamps. His seemingly endless talent and fabled speed earned him numerous awards and acclamations over the years. Czeslaw Slania finally became the world's most prized “legitimate” engraver.
Auguste Mayer, the Painter, had left France with his wife Catherine and their daughter Saga in the early spring of 1836, along with the rest of the “La Recherché” expedition that had been planned and commissioned by Paul Gaimard, “La Commission scientifique de Islande et de Groënland”. After sailing from Brest in Normandy, Meyer’s hometown, the expedition sailed north, around the west coast of Ireland, and finally landed at Reykjavík. Gaimard and his six associates, with 48 horses and numerous Icelandic attendants, set out from Reykjavík on 20 June 1836 and circled the country counterclockwise, arriving back in Reykjavík at the end of August.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that Postage stamps are much like people is what really makes them interesting. Stamps are dull and brilliant, obvious and concealed, useful and pointless, unique and mass-produced. Postage stamps are made to be inoffensive and yet around the world hundreds maybe even thousands of souls spend hour upon hour hoping to find something wrong with them.
The Artic circle can be surprising warm during the endless days of summer, on the 13th June 2005, at eleven o’clock in the evening in Kiruna airport, the sun was shinning and the temperature was 23 celsius. He hadn’t slept on the flight up like he had planned; his traveling companion had talked incessantly, mostly about their fellow employees. He felt tired and warm, not the best of combinations in the night-less North. Visiting staff from the Stockholm office often frequented Room 103.
In 1986, Slania produced engravings for six United Nations stamps on the theme “Philately — The International Hobby”. Two of these stamps reproduce engravings that show “Mr. Slania at work”, hunched over a polished steel die. When enlarged certain evidence comes to light. The official rapport was that Czeslaw Slania died at the age of 83 on the 17th of March 2005.
The first global scientific collaboration was made in the year 1761, around the world scientist of the day, aimed to calculate the distance of the Sun from Earth. Captain Cook on his journey to New Zealand even stopped of in Tahiti to make his own observations of the astronomical phenomena that was to help us know more about the neighborhood we live in. A total of 151 observations were finally recorded and the full transcripts were published by the then newly formed American Philosophical Society; this was to be the start of the modern scientific world that would soon lay claim to the domination of our waking Mind. The event that they carefully measured and recorded was the crossing of the planet Venus in front of the Sun, the Venus Passage. The event itself can occur singularly or be part of a pair that is separated by eight years. The reason for this is the angle of transection across the face of the Sun as seen from the planet Earth. This particular passage was a part of a pair that happened in 1761/69; the phenomenon occurs again every 113 or 130 years, the following Passages being in 1874/82 and after that 2004/2012.
In 1755 the Swedish Riks (it means National, like in the German “Reich”) Bank started what was called the Tumba Works. The purpose of this factory was the production of high quality paper on which the Swedish “Riksdalar” (the forerunner of the Swedish Crown) could be printed. The paper that had been used had been formerly imported from Holland. The production of high-class paper for printing had been something of a Dutch specialty. The printing press itself was said to have been invented by L.J.Koster of Haarlem, a Dutchman. Gutenberg’s “Vulvae Gate Bible” gets the credit for being the first ever-printed book, round 1455, the Dutch were big names in printing back then. But the really big development in printing came in 1865 when William Bullock of Philadelphia invented the first printing press to print from a continuous roll of paper. This called for an endless river of paper, which in turn made the endless Swedish forests an overflowing Cash Cow for the old Empire. Paper made from the forests of Sweden revolved itself on giant rolls into cash.
The report of the Gaimard expedition was published in Paris, between the years of 1838 and 1852, in eight separate volumes of text and one of geological illustrations, all in octavo format, plus three large and sumptuously produced folio volumes of lithographs. The first two of these works contain prints of the pictures made by August Mayer of the expedition itself that included not only the places it had visited but as well drawings of antiquities and portraits of Gaimard and a number of Icelanders. The book “Voyage en Islande et au Groënland” is the most elaborate single work ever published about Iceland. The pictures painted by Mayer, that remain today, are the single most important source of visual information about life in Iceland during the early 18 hundreds.
The Venus passage in 2004/2012 is the event that the Mayans up to. The Mayans considered 2012 AD, to be the End or Beginning of calculable time, as it turned out for the Mayans, the end of their particular life-style came somewhat more abruptly. The greatest of all known Mayan temple sites, Chichen Itza, fell to the “Mexican” invaders around 1000AD. The Mayan civilization would have collapsed under its own weight sooner or later; their wondrous temples that they built required immense amount of skilled labor. They always built in the middle of rain forests, which are known for being infested with wild beasts and hungry insects. The Mayans never developed metal tools such as ploughs, they never managed to invent the wheel and they actually never built cities, they just built temples. In fact their only other great achievement beyond the temples they built, was their mathematics and their unbelievable ability to calculate the passing of time with such decimal accuracy.
Upon graduation from the Marcin Wadowita high school in Wadowice, Karol Josef Wojtyla enrolled into Krakow’s Jagiellonian University in 1938 and he also joined a drama group and became one of the clandestine pioneers of the "Rhapsodic Theatre," The Nazi occupation of Poland closed the University in 1939 and Karol Wojtyla had to work in a stone quarry (1940-1944) and later in the Solvay chemical factory to earn his living and to avoid being deported to Germany. After WWII he continued his studies in the major seminary of Krakow, once it had re-opened, until his priestly ordination in Krakow on November 1, 1946. An old boyhood friend of Karol’s came to study in Krakow after the war. They had played football together as boys, but had lost touch when the Slania family had moved to Lublin and the Germans had turned Poland into a Human Oven. They were able to rekindle their friendship during those university years, after the Germans had gone back to what was left of their own back yard. The Actor and the Counterfeiter were just starting out on their own roads to be Kings.
Together in 2005, the Swedish Postage Stamp Department 1855 and Tumba Bruk 1755, two fine upstanding institutions, have produced a commemorative stamp and a commemorative 100-crown bill to celebrate the collective 400 years of paper wealth that has been produced from the high grade iron ore and paper from the endless forests of the European Nation of Sweden.
Documents, that are traceable in the lower strata of Historical Information, only achieve great value after a great period of time or an equal amount of misfortune. If an Official document, by chance alone, survives long enough; it has the chance of becoming exceedingly valuable. Take for example the cuneiform clay tablets from Lower Mesopotamia. They are receipts, made by local government Officials, recording the amount of grain delivered to temple store houses, by the local farming community. Boring. But given a few thousand years they become priceless. If that same boring document happens to be wrong then it will become valuable in much less time. The greater the mistake the less time is needed for it to become valuable. If the mistake was consciously wiped clean, leaving only the tiniest fraction of proof left, then the value of this mistake, this evidence of human weakness, will increase much faster. Limited Access & widespread media coverage increases the value of anything. We bury our treasure and our mistakes, the rest we burn.
Czeslaw Slania often told the story about the first stamp he made in a series of three for the Icelandic Post Services from 1986-88, Scott # 643, Crossing the ford at River Hvita; One day while he was working on the steel plate, his daughter, who was with him in his studio, watched him working. When he stopped to take a break, she took up his burin (his engraving stick) and imitated the grandmaster by making cuts across the steel plate, which ruined it of course. Slania had to start the entire job for the second time. The first original steel plate was laid aside as worthless and eventually lost. Czeslaw said that in the end he was happy to start over again as it gave him the chance to capture the mood of frustration that the expedition no doubt felt from time to time. One can only wonder if the little girl looking out from the stamp is Saga, the daughter of Auguste Mayer, or in fact Czeslaw Salina’s own little girl that had foiled his first attempt and given him a second chance, but unfortunately made the almost finished engraving plate worthless.
Operation Cornflake was meant to be a key part of a high level clandestine plan to undermine the morale of the average citizen. The standard 6-pfenning and 12-pfenning stamps were forged in sheets of 50 instead of the sheets of 100 as the originals were printed in. The main differences were firstly the quality of the paper, chalky coated paper for the originals but a duller paper for the forgeries and secondly the perforations were 14x14 1/2 for the originals but 11 1/2 to 13x12 1/2 for the forgeries. Also, an additional forgery of the 12-pfenning was made, but the inscription was altered to read "Futsches Reich" meaning "Ruined Empire". General “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) the America Spy Services during World War II, later they changed name to become the CIA. The OSS had ordered the forged stamps to be printed by their operations in Switzerland, apparently damn good forgers the Swiss, makes you wonder really. The Allies felt that if many German people started receiving Anti-Nazi propaganda mixed up in their morning mail, delivered punctually at breakfast time, they would feel that their "Great German Empire" was falling apart from within. The actual effect that Operation Cornflake had on the moral of the German people is hard to tell, probably at lot less than dropping 15 billion tons of high explosive on them, but it certainly annoyed some people. Operation Cornflake wasn’t the first time that the forging of stamps had been used as a weapon of mass confusion.
The Mining operations under the town of Kiruna have not only made a vast amount of money for the Swedish state but have also made an enormous hole in the ground beneath Kiruna. The rock that contains the iron ore is of course the rock upon which the town of Kiruna is built. The initial mine removed iron ore at ground level, and then they had to follow the mother-load deep into the bedrock and eventually they have had to burrow and dig right under the town. The ground has already started to crack under the pressure. There is a plan describing the areas of land that will have to be cleared from 2010 –2030. By 2030 AD at least half of the town will have to be moved from where it is situated today and moved at least 20 kilometers from the mine area. The church in Kiruna, the most holy of places, will have to be moved sometime between 2010 and 2020.
When Czeslaw Slania died at the age of 83 on the 17th of March 2005 it took about three months before his workroom at Posten Frimärken (Swedish Stamp Department), Kista, got cleaned out. It had been his room, the Masters’ room. So you didn’t want to let anyone just going in and pocking about in there. There were about three people who got the good stuff out, that was worth something, and then the boys from the warehouse, (the goods-in goods-out) guys, they get to deal with other peoples crap and moved out the rest of the furniture, where stuff gets lost and found, out the room into the dumpster.
The End.
