Philatelic exhibiting is a way of formally presenting part of one's collection at stamp expos that is akin to poster presentations at academic meetings. There are different types of exhibits, which are judged at larger philatelic expositions according to rather detailed and sometimes arcane guidelines.
A few years ago I even took a summer seminar on exhibiting at the American Philatelic Society just up the road in Bellefonte, PA. I realized I probably had the stuff, potential themes, and the ability for exhibiting, but I wasn't that keen on the formality, competitiveness, and judging vagaries of the process. I decided in the end on this blog as a different and less rule-bound way to present some of my collection and my related and sometimes unrelated thoughts.
Nonetheless, I decided to submit a short exhibit for the American Topical Association's one-page exhibit show. I mean, it was just one page, online, and unjudged, so it is a rather low stakes way to get some sense of the exhibiting experience. And sure enough, coming up with a theme gave me another way to look at my collection. I delved into my international IGY stamps more than I have so far in this blog. I knew that many countries that participated in the IGY never issued IGY stamps; that some countries that came out with rather attractive stamps were not necessarily the most active IGY participants; and that not all of the IGY stamps were actually issued during the IGY itself. So my result is this pdf, also shown below. I opted to show at least one stamp from each of the 19 countries I counted that actually issued one or more IGY stamps during the IGY period (not later, or on anniversaries), and noting the themes of the stamps. It was hard to cram 19 stamps onto one 8.5"x11" page, so the font is small, the margins are wide, and elements are crowded. So although the design is not ideal, I made it work in two days of off-and-on work. This will help me think about my collection in some different ways.
I'll have more to say about IGY countries another time.
This was chronologically the 431st oldest article out of exactly 1500 hits as of today in the New York Times ProQuest database when searching on the term "International Geophysical Year!" I'll have to explore what more "the newspaper of record" has had to say about our favorite scientific enterprise.
The full text reads as follows:
Geophysical Year Starts as World Studies Sun Storm
Scientists of 64 Countries Turn to Instruments for 18 Months of Research
Men Stand By at Poles
Whole-Earth Focus of Joint Effort - U.S. and Soviet to Launch Satellites
By Walter Sullivan
Special to The New York Times
Washington, June 30, 1957
As if to start the International Geophysical Year with a bang, the sun showered the earth with electron particles today, causing severe disturbances in this planet's upper air and magnetic field.
Radio communications on many long-range circuits were at a standstill,
The "year," which will last eighteen months, began at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, which as midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
President Eisenhower called it today "one of the great scientific adventures of our time."
Scientists the world over -- in sixty-four nations in the East and West -- turned on or checked recording instruments in the eleven sciences on which the effort is focused. These are the fields of study concerned with the earth as a whole.
In anticipation of this day Americans had been placed in the remote corners of the earth -- in specially constructed camps at the South Pole and on drifting ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Men on Mountain Peaks
Men of other nations worked in huts perched on mountain peaks while their instruments recorded the influx of cosmic rays, radio star impulses or other phenomena affected by the current magnetic storm.
They were on summits from Stalin Peak in Bulgaria to Mount Eva Perón in Argentina (neither name has been changed, at least in the I.G.Y. literature).
They were at Tungchwan in the mountains of southwest China, on Mount Norikura in Japan. American scientists were on Sacramento Peak at Sunspot, N.M.
The most dramatic events of the I.G.Y. will probably be the launching of earth satellites by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States launching is not expected before next spring. The Russians have set no date for their first shot.
Todays upheavals in the earth's atmosphere were the consequence of a solar flare that occurred at 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Friday. It was seen by the observatory at Krasnaya Pakhra twenty miles south of Moscow and reported to the World Warning Center at Fort Belvoir, Va.
A solar flare is an eruption in the chromosphere -- the atmosphere of the sun. It is usually followed, a day or two later, by severe magnetic storms on the earth. The World Warning Center issued an alert at noon Friday and a day later called a Special World Interval.
This was flashed to thousands of scientists around the world and called for the intensified observations in the sciences affected by such solar eruptions. These are concerned with the earth's magnetism, the ionized regions above the atmosphere whose layers normally reflect radio waves, cosmic rays, aurora and even weather.
Early today the deluge of electron particles from the sun reached the outer atmosphere.
The I.G.Y. was timed to coincide with a period of intense sunspot activity, but there has been evidence that the peak of the eleven-year spot cycle has already been reached.
Today's storm may prove to be the most severe of the I.G.Y. The eighteen-month length of the "year" was designed to carry it well beyond the peak of the cycle, to provide contrasting information from a period when the sun is quiet.
President Eisenhower pointed to the international cooperation that has made possible this scientific enterprise, regarded by many as the greatest in history.
He said that, in his view, "the most important result of the International Geophysical Year is the demonstration of the ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good."
"I hope," he said, "this can become common practice in other fields of human endeavor."
A basic precept of the I.G.Y. is that all information be exchanged. For this purpose three groups of World Data Centers have been established to collect and duplicate the mountains of information collected in the various sciences. The centers are in the United States, the Soviet Union and in Western Europe, with subcenters in Australia and Japan.
While many of the earth sciences are affected by events on the sun, others are more concerned with what takes place on or inside the earth. To study fluctuations in gravity American scientists have set up instruments in an unused tunnel near Dalton Canyon, California; Germans are in a potash mine and Italians are at work in a grotto near Trieste.
I'll make two comments on the contents of this article.
First is the statement that "The most dramatic events of the I.G.Y. will probably be the launching of earth satellites by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States launching is not expected before next spring. The Russians have set no date for their first shot." Yes, these launches were keynote events of the IGY. Note that both the U.S. and the USSR were expected to launch satellites. Those cagey Russians got Sputnik successfully into orbit without announcing the launch beforehand; the U.S. only got Explorer 1 into space four months later. Other than bragging rights (i.e., propaganda), this is a de facto tie. As I will write about another time, there was a big brouhaha that the Russians "beat us," but the intention and ability of the Soviets to potentially get into space first should have surprised no one who was paying attention.
Second is the statement "Today's storm may prove to be the most severe of the I.G.Y." There are models that predict how a solar cycle will play out, but I wonder how good they were back then. It seems a bit presumptuous to have made this "prediction," and looking back, we can see from solar activity graphs in a previous post that the sun became more active in solar cycle 19 after July, 1957. This compendium of significant historical solar storms does not list the July 1957 event, but it does include five other significant space weather storms that occurred later during the IGY.
Anyway, on this 64th "birthday" of the IGY, let's listen to the relevant Beatles song:
According to Wikipedia, this was one of the first songs Paul McCartney wrote, when he was 14, a year before the start of the IGY. It was finally released on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 (to mark the 10th anniversary of the IGY?), which I have as a CD (scan is below, top). I have seven Beatles albums on vinyl, including what I think is my oldest record, Meet the Beatles! (scan is below, bottom), the second album released by the band in the U.S., in 1964. What can I say, one of my favorite bands ever.
I played When I'm 64 recently for my editor, who was born 11 days before the beginning of the IGY. Not quite an IGY baby. But she's a spring chicken -- we celebrated my 70th birthday, one year delayed, six weeks ago with a family reunion in the Washington, D.C., suburbs not far from where I grew up.
I'm not quite sure if I have been languishing lately, but I've sure been lazy. I finally started working on a post about the psychology of collecting and ownership, and that will probably come soon, but I belatedly realized that a historic philatelic sale was happening this week. I can't figure out how to connect this to the IGY, but it is certainly an extreme example of what people will pay for stamps, and the "obsession" of owning (I hesitate to call this collecting) them (or other stuff).
I must not be sufficiently attuned to the news of philately, because I only realized this sale was happening when I received a link passed along from Paul Petersen, the indefatigable newsletter editor of the Philatelic Society of Lancaster. It was a nice video from Sotheby's, the auction house that sold the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta (1956) and the U.S. 24-Cent Inverted Jenny (1918) plate block (as well as a 1933 Double Eagle gold coin). These are two ‘holy grail’ postage stamps, which were BOTH on offer from the personal collection of fashion designer and entrepreneur Stuart Weitzman.
I previously posted a video that mentioned these stamps in my blog of Jan. 21, 2021. This was from the excellent Exploring Stamps vlog of Graham Beck. Graham had another informative video a couple of years ago on the One-Cent Magenta (shown on the video still),
as well as a more recent video on the Inverted Jenny (note the printing error showing an upside down Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane):
Although the history and notoriety of these high-end stamps are significant, I have to admit that this discussion left me a little cold. The relevance of these stamps to my interests and the economic sphere in which I live are pretty small. Once stamp collecting becomes a competition in speculation and investing by the uber-wealthy, I just don't much care. Perhaps my attitude was colored by the revelations this week by ProPublica about how our wealthiest billionaire citizens (legally) avoid paying income taxes. These same people characteristically make much publicized charitable contributions from which they reap tax and prestige benefits, but society would be better off if they instead paid their fair share of taxes.
In reading about the One-Cent Magenta, I learned that John E. du Pont, heir to the du Pont fortune and an avid philatelist, bought this stamp in 1980. It was later sold by his estate in 2014. Du Pont in the meantime had developed a fascination with wrestling, founded the Foxcatcher wrestling facility, and, after increasingly bizarre behavior, eventually murdered world class wrestler Dave Schultz. This story was the basis of the 2014 feature film Foxcatcher, and also (a better) documentary Team Foxcatcher (2016). Maybe it's not fair, but this du Pont confluence of extreme wealth, high-priced stamp collecting, and mental illness did not enhance my appreciation for the world of super valuable stamp acquisition. (Very annoying - in the Foxcatcher movie, the word philately was consistently mispronounced with a long a).
