Brian Ler on WNYC, all through this membership drive, we're exploring some of the popular ways we spend our time honing new skills and finding other people as obsessed as we are with making

things with yarn, clay, or glass, or spotting new birds. Yes, it's our end of membership drive

or end of show during the membership drive hobbies series. And today we're going to talk about

a classic hobby of collecting, specifically stamp

collecting. People still do it. We're joined for this by Charles Epting, stamp collector or

a philatelist, as they call them, to be fancy, and a vice president at Siegel auction

galleries where they recently sold a famous inverted Jenny stamp for a record

$2 million. Hey, Charles, welcome to WNYC. Thanks very much for having me, Brian. What's an inverted

Jenny stamp? So the inverted Jenny is arguably the most famous American postage stamp. In 1918,

airmail was a new invention. The idea of carrying

mail via airplane was sort of this radical crazy idea. And the government printed special

postage stamps to commemorate this new service famously on one sheet of 100 stamps. They printed

the airplane upside down in relation to the frame. And in the century or so

since the stamp was printed, it has become sort of the most legendary, iconic American stamp.

Why stamp collecting for you? It sounds like such an old-fashioned pastime.

Yeah. So growing up, I collected just about everything but postage stamps, whether

it was fossils or books, anything historic.

But stamp collecting, to me at least, had this stigma that it skewed older and wasn't

exactly relevant or cool.

But when I got to college, I was studying history, and I had this epiphany that postage stamps were not merely

little pieces of paper that you would try and collect one of each, but rather they were artistic,

cultural, historic windows into the past, their relics and eyewitnesses to the period in which

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