James L. Haley is a historian and novelist living in Austin, Texas. His biography, Sam Houston, won the 2003 Western Writers of America Spur Award for best western biography, and the Texas State Historical Association's Coral H. Tullis Prize for best book about Texas.

At the advent of new war with Iraq in March 2003, most Americans were unaware that Iraq is a cultural and religious patch quilt whose political boundaries are artificial constructs based on old colonial convenience. Collectors of the regionıs postage stamps, though, are quite familiar with the fact that after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, this province was administered as a British Mandate, calling the area by its former name of Mesopotamia, with postal duty done by Turkish stamps overprinted by the British occupation. The first postal issue of the newly named "Iraq" in 1923 depicted both a Sunni mosque and the Shia Golden Mosque of Kadhimain, a first attempt by a central government to acknowledge their thorny cultural diversity. The subsequent postal succession of kings and generals, revolutionary overprints, the annual homage to Army Day, and finally the omnipresent visage of Saddam Hussein, show abundant evidence of violence and disorder. This background of history, geography and sociology, all relevant to current events in which Americans are vitally interested, was to be painlessly gained by leaning back to observe how everyday people paid the postage on their letters. Whatever happened to stamp collecting?

For nearly twenty years I served on the committee at my church that oversaw our effort at campus ministry. Our college class numbered around a hundred students, for whom I did the whole church thing‹hosted Bible studies, taught classes, listened to their problems, bought lunches and played tennis. During those years, I couldnıt begin to count the times when, either while kicking butt in Trivial Pursuit or in casual conversation, I was interrupted with an astonished, "How do you know all that?" I am not an active pedant, but I might have made an innocent reference to history, geography, language, art, economics, sociology or any of the sciences. Confronted with a shell-shocked kid, and never at a loss to intimidate someone younger than myself, I generally replied, "Youıre the one going to college. How can you not know that?" The truth probably was, however, that I knew whatever it was because I started a stamp collection when I was nine years old, and never really outgrew it.

Today, I donıt know a single soul under the age of twenty-five who admits to having, or having ever had, a stamp collection. For the hobby, this is a demographic calamity well recognized and often agonized over in the philatelic press. Nor does it strike me as an unrelated consequence that the National Geographic Society, in their periodic surveys of American students and their proficiency in geography, reports a contemporary ignorance so complete and so stupefyingly vapid that those of us who grew up knowing the Nile from the Nyassa find it nearly incomprehensible. And of that small minority of American kids who do know anything of geography, I would bet you money that all of the handful of young stamp collectors are numbered in it.

When I was a child (Ike was president; thatıs all I will say) it seemed like every other kid I knew had a stamp collection. In the fifties it was widely advertised that there were 22 million stamp collectors in the United States. Today, the circulation of the most popular trade weekly, Linnıs Stamp News, circulates between fifty and sixty thousand, although several people, on average, read each one. But whether referring to trade statistics or to my own recollection, there has been in the United States a spectacular collapse of one of the worldıs most widely indulged indoor hobbies. What the hell happened?

Of course, the fifties of my childhood were also the days when Lucy and Desi were on television touting cigarettes as "healthful," and Rachel Carson was the only person on the planet who knew that DDT killed more than bugs. It was a simpler time: girls wore crinoline petticoats, boys read Boyıs Life, "Ozzie and Harriet" was on tv, most people trusted the government, and everybody had a stamp collection. The mailmanıs pouch was daily weighed down with approval packets from H. E. Harris or Littleton or Garcelon or Mystic. Most schools had stamp clubs; I can still point out the Monaco pictorial I acquired from a girl during lunch period in fourth grade. (Her name I forgot years ago, but the stamp,depicting the mythological nymph Salmacis, made an indelible impression, being the first representation I had ever seen of a ladyıs bare chest.)

Stamping had long been promoted as the hobby of aristocrats. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an avid collector, and personally designed many of the commemorative issues of his administration. King George V also took an active interest in designing stamps that were going to show his stern profile. Last year his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, auctioned off some of her duplicates from the Royal Collection‹stamps that were dazzling additions to the market for the rest of us‹in order to shell out for some of the few rarities that she doesn't already own. In more recent years John Sununu, President Reagan's chief of staff with a bad reputation for ruthlessness, was criticized for traveling in a government limousine to attend a stamp auction, at which he bought a copy of the first stamp issued by the United States. One Democratic senator declined to join in the attack, on the grounds that just knowing that Sununu saved stamps made him seem more human that anything else he had heard about him.

Even granting such a pedigree, stamp collectors always had something of an image problem, often seen as pooty dilettantes who would storm off in a snit over a blunted perforation, anal retentives who, unable to achieve perfection in their lives, might still seek it in their albums. In truth many were, and are, socially awkward, not quite with it; one of the ways Lucille Ball gigged Bob Hope in the 1940s movie Fancy Pants was with a derisive, "How's your stamp collection?" Perceived geekiness, though, did not by itself blight the hobby; with a little commitment from the industry that could have been overcome. The worst thing that happened to stamp collecting was the sixties: it lost its relevance. Beaver Cleaver put away his stamps when he burned his draft card and hitchhiked to Woodstock.

But its instructional benefit was no less, and for me, the education was the thing. I remember one stamp I had—since sold, which I regret—that did more than any book I ever read to form an image in my mind of the pervasiveness of the former British Empire. In 1953 each colony and dominion participated in an "omnibus" issue commemorating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Most of them used the same design, an engraving of the Dorothy Wilding portrait, surrounded by a delicate filigree and the date, 2nd June 1953. In some packet or mixture I acquired a copy of that stamp from the then postal federation of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. It bore what collectors call a CDS, or Circular Date Strike, clearly canceled in Oljoroorok, Kenya. A tiny hamlet not shown in most atlases, it conjured an image of droning, dusty-footed Kikuyus, heaving up and down in a line of spears and beaded cowskins. Elizabeth II, by the grace of God, Queen of Oljoroorok, Kenya. You canıt understand how far the Commonwealth has come, or how fast, until you see where it started from, and how recently.

Collecting seemed more exotic then, before the Euro, when stamps from European countries were still denominated in national currencies—marks, francs, lire—indeed, before all the currencies went decimal, when there were still twelve pies to the anna and sixteen annas to the rupee. (A small confession: when I was a kid I could do arithmetic adequately, but "new math" left me behind. When the teacher tried to conceptualize "base twelve" or "base twenty," I had the devilıs own time grasping it. If, however, he had merely thought to say, "twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound," I would have understood and added sums faster than an abacus. I was already educated beyond my grade level and didnıt know it.)

Africa was not yet, by and large, independent. Zaire was still the Belgian Congo, and stamps depicted Ubangi and Baluba and Pygmy and Babuende natives. How far weıve come, indeed. How many Americans, even African-Americans who claim such affinity with their ethnic roots, can name even a single tribe from the Congo rain forest, let alone identify their arts and crafts.

In more recent years my fallow collection has still proved itself useful. I remember feeding dinner to one of our church kids, a conservative Young Republican business major who was giving me a lecture on the dangers of inflation. "Keep talking," I said, "Iım listening," as I got up from the table, unshelved an album of old Germany and showed him a post-World War I era stamp, in the denomination of fifty billion marks. It was enough to mail a letter. "Now," I said, "What did you want to say about inflation?" Or I remember seeing with a group of them the 1985 film about Mozart, Amadeus, with the great character comedian Jeffrey Jones done up as a physical dead ringer for Emperor Joseph II. One of them asked me how I knew it was an accurate representation, and I showed her an old Austrian stamp reproducing the Guglielmi portrait of Joseph II that the make-up artists for Amadeus must have used in creating that character.

While perceived irrelevance was a big strike against stamp collecting during the grim throes of the sixties, almost everything else that has happened to cause the stamp decline, the business has done to itself.

Many countries, suddenly aware that there were millions of collectors around the world, ballooned their programs of new issues from a few per year to several hundred. By issuing stamps far beyond their postal need, many stamps were taken straight from the printing press to a canceling machine and actually issued in "used" condition. Officially such stamps are known as canceled-to-order (CTO, in the trade.) Unofficially they are known as "wallpaper." Even the most gullible collectors couldn't keep up with all of them, and purists became so disgusted that they purged stamps from the offending countries, and some sold their collections entirely. Even today, bulk dealers attract buyers by specifying "no CTO" in their advertisements, and the dilution of collectible stamps with CTO will get a dismissive review in a trade paper. The worst wallpaperers included countries of the communist bloc, celebrating triumphs like the opening of the Glorious People's Shoe Factory No. 12. (In the business, such issues are known as "IC" for Iron Curtain, the prejudice against which can be accurately gauged by substituting "IC" for "CTO," above.) Even worse have been newly independent British Colonies, particularly in the Caribbean. In its first hundred years St. Vincent, for example, issued about two hundred stamps; in the last forty years they have cranked out nearly three thousand. Not content with that, St. Vincent in 1974 began granting postal autonomy to its separate islands, resulting in several hundred more stamps from cays and reefs which are only barely inhabited, but which endlessly "honor" Princess Diana, Elvis and Mickey Mouse.

The abuse, and collector resistance to it, reached the point that stamp conferences began recommending in less and less delicate terms that the spew of junk stop. Better still, the suggestion was made that countries limit issues to actual postal need, and that stamps depict topics relevant to that countryıs history, culture and nature. The educational aspect of stamp collecting would then be restored, but such suggestions were ignored until revenues from new wallpaper dwindled to break-even. The "new issue" problem is slowly correcting itself, but great damage is done, and collector catalogs remain bloated with endless thousands of issues that are worthless and will always be worthless.

The United States has not been the worst offender. We have never issued CTOs, but we have taken critical shots, mostly for endless omnibus issues that cover all the states: the State Birds, the State Flowers, the State Flags, etc. Although they are expensive, increasing the cost of a new issue by a factor of fifty, an education argument can still be made for them. The greater problem has been the U.S. Postal Service, which once was a bulwark of support for the hobby, but is now notorious for its dicey relations with the collector community. One might date the slide to a single stamp, the Dag Hammarskjold commemorative in 1962. Collectors are always alert for printing errors; the most famous single American rarity, the "Inverted Jenny," was a 1918 airmail on which the central design of a Curtiss Jenny biplane was inadvertently printed upside down. A nice one today at auction runs over a hundred thousand dollars. When the U.S. honored the late U.N. Secretary General Hammarskjold, who had been killed in a plane crash, with a stamp, one sheet had the yellow color accidentally printed upside down. When the mistake was discovered by a collector, the Postal Service tried to recover the sheet and when it could not, it vindictively printed millions of "erroneous" sheets to destroy its value. It was a public relations disaster, and since then the Postal Service has played fair, allowing its few mistakes to become collectible rarities. It does, however, suffer from poorly trained clerks who deface stamps that would otherwise be suitable to collect, and the poor service of the now-centralized Philatelic Service Center is chronically editorialized.

Publishers and dealers have also done much to hurt their cause. Albums and paraphernalia have become prohibitively expensive. Of course the cost of all papers has increased over the years, but the heavy, acid-free stock necessary for the preservation of collectible stamps has become outrageous. One of the best known, main-line albums, the Scott International Series, complete through the present time, retails at over $4,000 for the pages alone; binders and slip cases are extra. For an album devoted to a single country, $75 to $150 is an average price.

Then, too, the greed that pervaded the 1980s made itself felt in the stamp markets, inflating a speculative bubble that drove prices of good material through the roof. Retail dealers began favoring choice classics for investors and gave less attention to average collectors. The (often lonely) neighborhood maven who could take hours to pick through stock to fill blank album spaces with common issues, suddenly found himself or herself relegated to a sorting table with Tupperware canisters of penny stamps, or just as often, frowned out the door. Nor could dealers be entirely blamed for wanting to make a living, which penny and nickel stamps could no longer support. However, once the bubble popped, many dealers found they could no longer cover the cost of doing business, and retail outlets plummeted in number. This in turn led to an increase in so-called suitcase dealers who sell only at expositions and bourses, and made collecting itself more difficult.

Many small-purchase buyers were young people, and dealers would have done well to invest some time cultivating a future generation, many of whom, with encouragement, become lifetime collectors and investors willing to write sizeable checks for material they want. When I was nine, my mother would stop by the neighborhood post office and I would buy a plate block of the newest commemorative. The kindly old clerk would take time to pick one for me that was well centered, and sometimes even asked if I knew anything about the person or subject depicted. At fourteen, I fancied I was tired of the hobby, and tried to sell my collection at Wallace's in Ft. Worth. The legendary (in the hobby) Mr. Wallace declined to buy it, even for a few dollars, and suggested that I merely set it aside. I might come back to it after a time. He was right, God rest his soul. I also remember a couple of adult neighbors who traded duplicates with me, at considerable advantage to myself. Thank you, Mrs. McElwreath wherever you are.

So far from this attitude being prevalent in recent years, children who do take the trouble to attend stamp expositions and dealer bourses have been either eyed suspiciously or shunted aside to watch the big boys play. Of course young people, especially boys, are acquisitive by nature, and when stamp dealers could not be bothered with them, the entrepreneurs of sports trading cards curried them like heirs to the family fortune. As the previous generation passes from the scene, the need for new collectors has become acute and highly publicized. Stamp shows now regularly feature activities for young collectors, and donations of stamps are regularly made to re-start stamp clubs in schools. And, although not yet reinstated as "cool" here, stamp collecting abroad is still quite "cool." European or Asian students or tourists in the United States commonly visit American stamp shops and stock up on their national issues before going home, where the same stamps are all but unobtainable because those stocks were sucked dry for the American market decades ago. These shrewd people then go home, either to become the envy of their collecting friends, or else to unload the stamps for a hefty profit.

Other changes in the economy and society have resulted in things looking up for the stamp hobby. The internet has revolutionized not just stamps but all the collectibles markets, and while the buyer, without a dealer accountable to the trade association, must beware as never before, cutting out expensive middlemen has resulted in genuine bargains on a blizzard of websites. Album page programs widely available on CD-ROM have somewhat liberated collectors from the tyranny of overpriced albums. There has been a decided increase in overall market activity, with good sales being aggressively bid in-so much so that last year a consortium of well-known auction houses seeking to accelerate their own recovery were indicted on federal price-fixing charges. And on the 20-year curve, even taking the speculative bubble and collapse into account, stamps are still top performers in investment portfolios. My friends who lost their shirts in tech stocks have trouble assimilating that the Great Britain, Canada and British Africa I bought four or five years ago have doubled or even tripled In value.

And then there is the nerve therapy factor. As a socially responsible artist I feel compelled to take on my share of the evil in the word. But when the network news is too depressing, and when the horsemen of the apocalypse gallop too near my door, I find it somehow reassuring to find that the engraved gaze of Queen Victoria is just as benign now as it was when Canada honored her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. And maybe one day the confidence of the United States will be restored to what I find reflected in that flurry of great continental exhibitions from the turn of the last century.

It is too soon to know with certainty that stamp collecting is enjoying a full-fledged comeback, but at least it no longer seems inevitable that those of us who will leave behind sizeable collections will saddle our executors with unsellable dinosaurs. And in the end, those personal benefits that once made it the most popular hobby in the world‹education, solid investment, a sense of connectedness and mental travel‹still lie nascent within granddad's albums.