Brian Lear 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 the classic hobby of collecting specifically stamp collecting people still

do it we're joined for this by Charles Epting, Stamp Collector, or Philatellist, 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, Air Mail was a new invention.

The idea of carrying mail via airplane was mail was sort of this radical, crazy idea, and the government printed special postage

stamps to commemorate this new service famously on one sheet of a hundred 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

fashion past time? Yes 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

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