Why stamps are cool in the age of email

Deepak Modi is a 25-year-old, newly-minted MBA, keen to start his own business. Not the sort you would picture as a stamp collector in the 21st century. But he’s been into it in a serious way ever since a chance encounter with a naval officer based in the Andamans, who opened his eyes to the intricate web of philately, and the money to be made from it.

Modi is hooked, and spends hours on a computer at his home in Jalna, tracking down stamps around the world. And not just any stamp; he craves what the cognoscenti call postal cancellations.

A ‘cancellation’ simply refers to the mark a post office puts on a stamp so that it doesn’t get used again; it usually has a date and the name of the post office. Post offices also issue pre-cancelled stamps for special occasions, and these are what collectors like Modi die for. He spotted one on eBay the other day and immediately placed a bid. “Bidding for it started as low as Rs50, but I’m sure it’s going to rise quickly,” he said. A few weeks earlier, he bought a stamp depicting the Kedarnath temple.

Auction sites and other web resources have vastly broadened the scope of finding valuable stamps, as well as showcasing them online.
The net has also turned millions of people into stamp collectors (48 million, according to one estimate). When you couple that with the fact that the supply of stamps is drying up in the email age, and that stamps are a perishable commodity (one collection worth £200,000 went up in smoke in the recent Australian bushfire, for example), you can see how an investment in stamps may be well worth one’s time and money.

Last November, auctioneer David Feldman sold a Mauritius Post Office Ball Envelope to Vikram Chand, a collector in Singapore. The Ball Envelope was first used on invitations sent out for a fancy dress ball thrown by the governor’s wife. Only three such envelopes survive; one is in the British Library Museum, another is owned by Queen Elizabeth II. The price paid was not released; but the envelope has been insured for $4 million. Feldman says he plans to set up a stamp investment fund this year.

According to eBay India, someone buys a stamp online every 12 minutes. Among the most popular are those of Mahatma Gandhi, and stamps from India’s erstwhile princely states. India’s rich past makes investments in rare Indian stamps attractive, according to Adrian Roose, investment manager at Stanley Gibbons, international philatelists. “It has been notable at London auction houses where the prices for the rarest Indian stamps continue to increase.”

Indeed, among the world’s most valuable stamps is a 10-rupee Gandhi whose catalogue value recently went up from £14,000 to £25,000. “We have a waiting list of clients wishing to obtain this stamp,” says Roose.

But it’s not only about the rarest of rare stamps. Lal Thadani, a south Mumbai businessman who runs a stamp shop on eBay, recently sold a set of used Indian stamps for Rs18000, a good return on something he spent little to acquire. For Valgean Fernando, the foray into stamps began when he discovered his grandfather’s pouch of stamps. He now has a certificate from eBay for selling stamps in the most number of countries. Pradip Mohanty from Orissa says he began collecting stamps when he was running around to pay taxes for a family property. One court fee stamp that he bought for Rs20 later sold for Rs2000.

Serious collectors will tell you that the key to making a good purchase lies in the knowledge you can mine about a stamp’s provenance, print order, unique markings etc. Here again the net comes in handy.

But there’s a caveat. Manik Jain in Kolkata, who took to philately four decades ago, says many online stamp sellers are out to take buyers for a ride.

Paradoxically, however, the forged stamp may occasionally be worth much more than the genuine article, as Manik Jain found. “Once a gentleman came to me with a stamp which had the impression on both sides of the paper, clearly a product of forgery at some point in the past. But since that forged stamp was the only one of its kind, it was very valuable.”

You might think Jain has a big collection of stamps, but that’s not the case. “I used to think some stamps I will never sell. But how many times can you resist the temptation of the buyer? Maximum three to four times. After that, once you feel the eagerness of the collector to possess a stamp, you are bound to respect that.” And that just about sums up the stamp lover’s passion.

With inputs from Sumanta  Ray Choudhury in Kolkata