The strange world of the stamp collector

THEY'RE strange people, stamp collectors. Take Ken Sanford, a Californian who was in Dublin for the weekend's National Stamp Exhibition.

Ken's special interest is plane crashes. He scours the world for post which has been on aeroplanes that crashed, and Pan Am crashes are his particular speciality.

His collection includes samples from the Pan Am plane which went down at Shannon in 1947 and one of his obsessions is to add something from the mailbags recovered from the Lockerbie disaster.

Ken is not alone in his hobby. He points out cheerfully that he has just attended the inaugural meeting of the international Wreck and Crash Society, which unites the aficionados of plane, train and boat accidents in their common cause. Furthermore, when a major crash collection came up for sale last year, he had no problem finding two friends to join him in coughing up the necessary $25,000, which he thinks was a bargain.

Ken doesn't even know he's strange. "I tell people I didn't cause the plane crashes. They happened and they're historical events now, and it's just another collection on a historical theme."

In the interests of balance, it should be pointed out that the individual exhibitions on show in Dublin at the weekend included such wholesome themes as Irish peacekeeping in the UN, the life and times of Mozart and the postal depiction of mushrooms.

The chairman of the exhibition, Mr Finbar O'Mahony, walked among the entries like a child in a sweetshop, explaining to the uninitiated how the cut throat world of stamp collecting and display works. The stamps and letters are only part of it, he says. It's the depth of the research and the manner of its presentation that makes the difference between a gold medal performance and anything less.

Every old letter has a story - like one in Finbar's own exhibit on the postal history of Cork. The envelope was stamped twice in a Cork post office, in contravention of the rules. But the date on the postmark - 24th December 1808 - leads Finbar to speculate that the stamp happy clerk might have had drink taken.

Stamps have a more general educational value too, as an 1867 sample in the collection of Whyte's Auctioneers shows. It was prepared by the Fenians for use in the Irish Republic they were then confident of setting up, and the "24 cents" cost reveals that their plans included a switch to the metric system.

Sadly, in their attention to such details as planning the new postal service, the Fenians neglected the bit about overthrowing the British government. So the stamp was never used.