I’m not much of a TV watcher. When I’m in a bit of a masochistic mood, I’ll turn on the Phillies game or the Eagles and watch them lose. But most evenings, after dinner and an hour or two with my wife, I go to my reading room and read novels and history and politics – or just surf the web and see how one article leads to another. Hours can be spent this way, pleasurable hours learning fascinating things. If I hadn’t spent all day working on stamps, I’d probably add philately to my nightly interests.
But there is so much TV right now. We get over three hundred channels at our house and Netflix and Amazon have tens of thousands of movies and original programming available at all times. If you are a reader, Amazon has several million books available for instant download and entire university libraries have been scanned and are available online. In 1960, there were three TV stations and if you didn’t want to watch Gunsmoke or Bonanza on a Sunday evening and you didn’t have a good book that you had purchased at the bookstore or borrowed from the library, unless you had a hobby, you were out of luck. That’s one of the reasons why philately was more popular fifty years ago – people kept collections as something to do in case they got bored.
Considering the competition that we have – the fact that virtually every movie, TV show, periodical, book, or sales catalog that has ever been made is available for our instant use, the wonder isn’t that philately has lost some popularity, it’s that its retained so much interest after all. There is something special about our solitude with our stamps, the thrill of acquiring a needed item at an attractive price that has kept, and will keep, stamp collecting an active and important part of many people’s life.