Cover of my FDOI program for the Battle of Gettysburg stamp, showing the first day cancellation
Committee for the Centennial program (p. 2 of the program)
I do have that stamp on an extras page in my childhood stamp album:
Heavily canceled Battle of Gettysburg stamp outlined in gray
President Eisenhower, who was living in Gettysburg after his presidency, spoke as part of the ceremonies, somberly commemorating the battle and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
This gift from the USSS was especially appropriate, as the battlefield is only an hour from my house. I last visited with my nephew Matthias and his wife Filiz in the summer of 2017.
Gettysburg Battlefield, August, 2017
Interestingly, on that day we ran into a news team that was doing a story on the presence of Confederate memorials in the Park, as the controversy over whom we should honor with monuments was rising in prominence.
A poem in the FDOI program, Pickett's Charge, was written by James "Jimmy" Van Alen (no, not Van Halen), perhaps best known as the founder of the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame in his hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, and as deviser of the now commonly used tie-break scoring system in tennis.
I have been joking with my wife and with my readers about various coincidences that I have latched onto as I have written my posts (which is why this post does not deal at all with the IGY). I thought it rather interesting that I received this gift with the poem by James Van Alen the day after my last post, which partly dealt with physicist James Van Allen. I mean, there is just one letter "l" separating these two men! This made me think about psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity. According to Benjamin Radford, Jung's concept of synchronicity is essentially describing "meaningful coincidences." I prefer Radford's explanation that synchronicity is really a manifestation of simple coincidence and the human desire to create connections through confirmation bias (which in these times of information bubbles we should all be wary of), as opposed to Jung's suggestion of synchronicity being due to some sort of meaningful universal connection, even if not directly causal.
Hmm, it is probably a coincidence that just last week I watched the movie A Dangerous Method (2011), directed by David Cronenberg, about the complex relationships between Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (initially a patient of Jung and later one of the first female psychoanalysts).
I've had a couple of comments on my blogs so far. After this post, one commenter asked:
What is more valuable, the isolated plate block (i.e. separate/ripped out of the pane), or the larger pane/sheet? Are the images of your plate blocks cropped from the larger panes?
Do stamps lose value if stamps from a plate block and/or pane have been folded along the perforated holes?
Finally, any interesting tidbits on stamp counterfeiting? Is it relatively easy to counterfeit stamps? (Granted, for new/recent stamps, I can imagine it wouldn't be worth the effort, given the marginal value compared to paper currency.)
So let me try to answer these good questions.
1. I bought my plate blocks as such. I did buy a couple of full panes, but have kept them intact. I would guess that the most common groupings of stamps sold in the U.S. are as singles, plate blocks, and panes, respectively.
The cheapest plate block prices I am seeing today on eBay for the IGY stamp Scott #1107 are about $1 for the 4 stamps. So, $1/block, or $0.25 per stamp.
The lowest price for a pane of this stamp is $7 for the 50 stamps, including four plate blocks, so that's $1.75/block, or $0.14/stamp. So if you want blocks at a lower price, buy the blocks. If you want a lot of stamps, a pane is more cost effective.
2. There is a complex grading system for determining the authenticity and quality, hence monetary value, of stamps (i.e., expertizing) that I have never worried about too much. See, for example, this description from the Philatelic Foundation, one of the big four expertizing groups in the U.S. One of the factors in determining the grade is creasing. So if a block had been folded along the perforations, and this were evident, I imagine that would affect its value.
3. One reason for expertizing (having an acknowledged expert evaluate a stamp, for a fee of several tens of dollars) is the possibility that stamps are fakes or forgeries. Fakes are stamps that have been modified to try to remove flaws and enhance their value, e.g., re-gumming the backs, as might be done by unscrupulous vendors (thankfully, a small minority). Forgeries are the skillful re-creations of very valuable stamps. "Counterfeit" stamps per se are more mundane attempts to imitate valid postage stamps that could be used in the mail. I don't really know how easy or common these practices are, but they certainly exist.
People collect stamps for different reasons. Most of us are not, or should not, be concerned about the monetary value of our stamps. In this YouTube video, Mr. Ted shows us that in recent decades stamps in general have not been a good investment, or store of value (my older son swears that Bitcoin is!). On the other hand, one expertizing company says "Collectors who spend more than $50 per stamp are considered advanced and can amass a valuable collection over time." This isn't me, though; so far, I have not spent that much on any stamp or cover. I assume that stamp values follow some variant of the Pareto principle, where 20% of items account for 80% of their total value. For one extreme, check out Graham Beck's excellent vlog on his selections of the most interesting valuable stamps,
including the over-$1 million dollar 1856 British Guiana 1¢ Magenta (1856) and the U.S. Inverted Jenny (1918). The former is valuable just because there is only one extant copy, the latter because of a printing error in one sheet of the original issue.
I have not been logging the purchase prices of my collections. But I think the most expensive stamp I have bought so far is the Soviet Union stamp issued on Nov. 28, 1957, showing the pioneering Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, which cost me $20. An earlier Tsiolkovsky stamp (Russia, Scott #1991) was issued on Oct. 7, 1957, about a month after the centennial of his birth, but presumably timed to nearly coincide with what turned out to be the successful launch of Sputnik 1 (Earth's first artificial satellite) on October 4, during the IGY. On Nov. 28, 1957, another stamp with the same design was issued, but now with an overprint caption(Russia, Scott #2021) to specifically acknowledge the launch. By the way, one factor in stamp grading is centering of the design on the stamp; you'll notice that neither of these excel on that criterion.
Scott catalog Russia #1991, issued Oct. 7, 1957
Scott catalog Russia #2021, issued Nov. 28, 1957
Possibly my most expensive cover purchase so far, also for $20, is shown below.
Philatelic cover for the 25th anniversary of America's first successful satellite launch, signed by James Van Allen
This was postmarked on Jan. 31, 1983, twenty-five years after the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, was launched into orbit in 1958, also during the IGY but several months after Sputnik 1. The price was higher because of the signature of physicist James Van Allen, who confirmed the existence of the eponymous Van Allen radiation belts as a result of data collected during the Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 missions.
I haven't been reading the funnies in the newspaper ever since looking at them started giving me excessive eye strain. But lately I have subscribed to getting a daily email of the Savage Chickenscartoonby Doug Savage.
Standing tough under stars and stripe We can tell This dream's in sight You've got to admit it At this point in time that it's clear The future looks bright
Besides whatever political inferences you might draw from this cartoon, about one Donald or another, the retro-futuristic reference to jetpacks is consistent with the lyrics of I.G.Y., and some of the techno-optimism of the 1950s.
Speaking of techno-optimism, The Jetsons was an animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions which I watched on tv when it aired from September, 1962, until March, 1963 (short run!). This family of the imagined future not only wore the spandex jackets mentioned in the I.G.Y. song, but they also had their jetpacks:
I bought a DVD set of The Jetsons a few years back, covering 14 of the original 24 episodes. (The names of son Elroy and dog Astro show up occasionally as NY Times crossword puzzle answers.)
The cover of my DVD set of The Jetsons first season
For additional imaginings about the future, I sometimes look at the subreddit for "retro-futurism." A subreddit is an online community for posts on a particular topic as part of the larger universe of the social media Reddit website. The Retrofuturism subreddit "focuses on the futurist visions of eras past," that is, a look backwards to people who were looking ahead. Go check it out. The future looked bright!
First off, I want to give kudos to the library staff of the American Philatelic Research Library at the American Philatelic Society. I re-joined this group last year after a hiatus in my membership. I have already found it useful in a number of ways. One thing you can do is search the bibliographic databases of the library, and order articles or even books in its holdings to be emailed or sent to you. Staff members Scott Tiffney (Director of Information Services/Librarian) and Sarah Berezenko (Library Assistant) have sent me pdfs of a couple of key articles for this post.
The term plate block refers to a group of stamps from a sheet that are still attached to each otherand bear the serial number of the printing plate in the sheet’s margin (the selvage). A block most often, but not necessarily, means a group of four stamps.
When I was a young stamp collector, I collected plate blocks, which was popular back then. Here is one page from my stock book, of blocks that are over 55 years old.
Plate blocks I collected in the 1960s
Unfortunately, I was not careful about how I stored these. The pressure of overlying weight over the years have pretty well glued these into my stock book. Oh well ... I've been more careful with my recent acquisitions.
One of the articles that I requested and received from the APS was titled "Plate block collecting," by Barry Krause, from the September, 1996, issue of Global Stamp News, p. 26-29. Krause explains that U.S. stamps are printed in sheets, usually with four panes to a sheet. If you go to the post office, and ask for a "sheet" of stamps, what you are really getting is a pane. The relationship between a sheet and its panes is shown for the 1962 Project Mercury stamp in the figure marked as "full press sheet" on this web page from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. The plate numbers are small, but you can see one per pane, from each of the four corners of the sheet.
Below is a pane from my collection of the U.S. IGY stamp. There are 50 stamps in this pane, hence 200 in the sheet, as mentioned in the specs for this stamp from an earlier post. There is a small strip of the selvage at the top, and a wider strip on the left side. The plate block number is shown in the lower left corner. The corresponding plate block is outlined in blue. As also mentioned in my earlier post on U.S. Scott #1107, this was the fourth U.S. stamp printed using the Giori Press, which allowed for simultaneous application of two or three differently colored inks, and hence only one plate number was needed in each corner of the sheet, rather than separate numbers for each color. This was also the case for the Project Mercury stamp.
Lower left pane of U.S. Scott #1107. Note the plate number in the lower left corner, and the corresponding outlined plate block.
A plate block separated from the pane, with the same plate block number, is shown below.
Lower left plate block of U.S. Scott #1107.
These four plate blocks with the same plate number could have come from the four different panes from one sheet. These are the upper left, upper right, lower left, and lower right plate blocks, based on the positions of the plate block numbers.
Clockwise from top left: upper left, upper right, lower right, and lower left plate blocks, with the same plate block number
Another article provided by the APS Research Library was a page from the 2020 Durland Standard Plate Number Catalog, which lists the plate numbers used for the printing of each U.S. stamp. The numbers used for Scott #1107 were 25978, 25985, 25990, 25993, and 26010. It turns out I have each of those numbered blocks in my collection. Robert Rabinowitz, in an article titled "Plate block collecting is changing" (Stamp Collector magazine, Dec. 26. 1992, p. 1, 3), calls this a complete matched set. The plate blocks shown below all have the plate number in what would have been the upper left corner of the sheet, hence would be called upper left plate blocks.
Plate blocks showing the five plate numbers used for printing the U.S. IGY stamp
Krause pointed out in his 1996 article that plate block collecting lost some of its appeal in the 1970s. Costs increased, especially for complete matched sets, as the number of stamps in a block was sometimes greater than four, face values of stamps increased, and more stamps were issued every year.
More on stamp production and printing, and maintaining a stamp collection, in future posts.
This past week has been challenging, what with all the political turmoil. So I'll opt for a lighter post, with another musical entry.
Several popular music pieces are themed on the IGY. The best known song, which I will focus on in this entry, was "I.G.Y.", written and sung by Donald Fagen (previously of Steely Dan) as a solo artist, issued in 1982, the 25th anniversary of the IGY. I didn't read the local Sunday paper yesterday, where I usually scan the celebrity birthdays. Had I done so, I would have seen that it was Donald Fagen's 73rd birthday, and I would have finished this entry to post it on his special day. Anyway, belated regards!
I own I.G.Y. as a vinyl 45 rpm (4 copies), with Walk Between Raindrops as the B side. The single reached number 8 on Billboard's 1982 Adult Contemporary chart, and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1983, losing to "Always on My Mind" (by Willy Nelson, who was featured in the Monk episode Mr. Monk and the Red-Headed Stranger that I coincidentally watched just yesterday).
On the vinyl, the song is called "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)"
Front of the single's jacket
The back cover titles the song "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)", clarifying the reference
Here you can listen to the studio version. Below is an excellent live performance of the song. That's Donald Fagen on the vocals, and Steely Dan partner Walter Becker (RIP) on guitar:
I didn't really get the meaning of the song for years, since it came out at a time when I did not follow popular music so closely. Plus, the lyrics never specifically mention the IGY or geophysics.
I also own a 33-1/3 vinyl LP (2 copies), cassette (1 copy), and the CD (1 copy) of the album The Nightfly. The website best albums ever ranks it via meta-analysis as the 9th best album of 1982 (Thriller was #1), 95th best of the 1980s (Doolittle by The Pixies was #1), and 637th best album ever (Ok Computer by Radiohead was #1).
The album liner notes contain the significant:
"Note: The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build."
You can see in this note and in the lyrics below a retro-futuristic techno-optimism that Fagen as a young lad might have shared with his fellow Americans during the period of the IGY in the late 1950s, although it has been suggested that this was a sarcastic look backwards at things that never came to be. Imaginations of solar-powered cities, a transatlantic tunnel, permanent space stations, and spandex clothing, all managed by wise technocrats wielding powerful computers, just might have become reality in time for a marvelous U.S. bicentennial in 1976.
Lyrics
Standing tough under stars and stripes We can tell This dream's in sight You've got to admit it At this point in time that it's clear The future looks bright On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
What a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space While there's time The fix is in You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky You know we've got to win Here at home we'll play in the city Powered by the sun Perfect weather for a streamlined world There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone
What a beautiful world this'll be What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris (More leisure for artists everywhere) A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision We'll be clean when their work is done We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this'll be What a glorious time to be free
Something like this, perhaps:
I also have the sheet music (2 copies). First page:
Aren't you glad you now know this song is about the International Geophysical Year!
A future post will include some covers of this song, and a couple of other IGY tunes.
On NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR is a favorite news source in our household), there was a story about the The Music of the Northern Lights. Composer Matthew Burtner created a piece of music called Auroras by recording very low frequency emissions of aurorae (4th area of study for the IGY) and transforming them into audio.
This is an example ofsonification, the process of turning non-aural information into sound. Below, I'll present several examples of how different types of geophysical data have been turned into audible sounds.
My favorite example of geophysical sonification is a composition by Charles Dodge. His 1970 piece Earth's Magnetic Field is based on note-keeping methods for so-called Kp indices, which represent short-term changes in the global magnetic field (3rd area of study for the IGY), which can be transposed into musical notation.
I bought this on vinyl in the mid-1970s at my favorite record store in Tucson when I was in graduate school. I still have it:
Charles Dodge, Earth's Magnetic Field (1970), front album cover
Charles Dodge, Earth's Magnetic Field (1970), back album cover
Charles Dodge, Earth's Magnetic Field (1970), Side A
You can listen to Side A of the record here:
I scanned the liner notes for the album (vinyl! albums! liner notes!) which give a nice description of how this piece was produced. Rather than inserting those lengthy comments in the blog, I posted them here. I could not find these anywhere else online.
NASA has posted a sonification of vibrations of the sun here. Solar activity is the 6th area of study for the IGY.
The catalog for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (usually for folk music) includes a 1955 recording, Ionosphere. This effort was a product of Cook Laboratories, run by renowned audio engineer Emory Cook. The ionosphere was the 5th area of study for the IGY.
The solid Earth makes sound as well. Pre-sonification, the Seismological Society of America (located a stone's throw from where my older son lives in El Cerrito, CA) posted a collection of 21earthquake related sounds, prepared by Karl V. Steinbrugge, originally published in 1974 and updated with eight additional sounds in 1985. The collection was sold by the Society for many years, originally as an audio cassette tape which I once owned, but I think I discarded it after I retired. Here, for example, is the voice of a man rather excited by the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964.
But seismic waves are very amenable to sonification. Ben Holtzman, a geophysicist at Lamont-Doherty Geophysical Observatory, Columbia University, has co-produced audio and visual representations of seismic wave data, including a representation of the 2011 magnitude 9 (4th largest in history) Tohoku Earthquake. Sonification of other significant earthquakes (including the 2004 m=9.1 Sumatran quake, third largest in history) produced by this group can be found here. Seismology was the 12th area of study for the IGY, so 5 of those 14 areas of geophysical study are represented in this post.
You can find some other cool examples of geophysical sonification on your own.
There are also some popular songs that refer directly to the IGY, but that's another post.
