Last April Fools' Day, I did a silly post on completing a Big Blue Volume One. Long time reader Bud was inspired by my post to ponder more seriously the implications of just what completion means in the context of the Intentional. With his permission, I am posting his thoughts which I hope you will enjoy as much as I have.
Congrats to the as yet unnamed 1000 collectors who this year completed a Scott International Volume One (Big Blue, or BB for short), and especially to Philip Tellick. It’s a milestone, and a cause for deep reflection.
Imagine 1000 completed BB V1s! Each would have to be housed in at least six binders, and the binders are exactly one foot long. That means, if the 1000 collectors were to lay their albums end to end. the blue streak would be over a mile long. What’s more, each album has 34,706 stamps (+ or -, depending on the edition) and the average size of a stamp is about 1.25 inches. So, if the stamps were laid end to end, they would stretch Montgomery AL to Baltimore MD. Still further, if the 1000 collectors have an average age of 70 (I guess they would probably be older), and if the years of their lives were in sequence or, so to speak, laid end to end, they would go back 70,000 years to the time of the Toba volcanic catastrophe when humans almost vanished from the earth. Maybe they had stamps back then, too, but all of those who collected them perished in the conflagration and their collections with them. Enough statistical nonsense.
Your news does, however, make me wonder under what conditions we can judge a Scott International Volume One as being “complete.” Did the album publishers give us the gold standard for what “complete” means? (Obviously not. You have repeatedly pointed out BB’s glitches and mistakes in your blog.) Does “complete” mean there is some stamp or other in every space provided? (That’s complete, yes, but not a very satisfying notion.) Does “complete” mean a collector, having done the best she can, is finished with collecting and declares that, in so far as she’s concerned, "it’s complete”? (Well. maybe. Many of the collections sold on ebay are said to be “complete” in this way.)
What we need, before judging any particular album as being “complete”, is not some precisely given definition of completeness for all BBs, but is a notion of what constitutes sufficient grounds for judging any particular album as being complete. I’m helped in making such a claim by a new philosophy book I just finished reading. I’ve listed the book’s title at the end of this post in case you’re of a philosophical bent and want to burn some brain dust. It’s short, but may take you weeks to read.
So then, what constitutes sufficient grounds for judging when a BB V1 becomes “complete”? Jim is providing the best notion of what this might look like in his blog (http://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.com/). His sufficient grounds are uncomplicated, and in summary are (my wording):
• Each stamp should be placed in the album space that corresponds to the Scott Catalog number for that stamp. The album provides color, value, and date clues for this task, but they’re not always reliable.
• In many instances, multiple stamps are eligible candidates for single space. Any one of them will do. Likewise, both mint and used stamps will do.
• Blank spaces should be filled, in so far as possible, with any stamps, of any value/variation, selected from the same series that do not already have a designated album space.
• When the above guidelines cannot be followed because of album inconsistencies, select stamps that approximate the date specifications.
• Damaged stamps qualify. Condition is not a consideration for determining completeness of the album.
• Avoid fakes and forgeries.
• Fill all spaces.
That’s about it. These are the sufficient grounds for judging an album as being “complete”. And there’s nothing more authoritative out there. The idea that Scott editors defined, once and for all, what makes the album “complete” is a myth. They didn’t do that, nor could they if they had tried.
I’ve been putting the word “complete” in quotation marks because any particular album that conforms to the above criteria is still in many ways incomplete. The notion “completeness” has embedded within it the reality of incompleteness. Take my own album as an example (it’s being serialized in Jim’s blog). When I had filled all spaces, friends ask me what I was going to collect next. I said that I was going to continue completing my “completed” album. And that’s what I’m doing and will continue doing.
If someday there actually are 1000 “complete” BBs, all qualifying on sufficient grounds as being “complete”, no two of them will be alike. That’s 1000 different definitions of what “complete” means. And they all -- at one and the same time -- are not perfectly final definitions and are final definitions that are perfectly good. That’s the charm of stamp albums. Confusing? Ask Sebastian.
The above-mentioned book: Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2018. It’s not about judging album completeness, exactly. It’s about all judgments.
The famous stamp collector Josiah Lilly said that there were 100,000 postage stamps he wanted for his collection and he succeeded in acquiring 77,000. My considerably easier target is 35,000 of the more common stamps from 1840-1940 contained in the Scott Blue International Album Volume 1. This blog will record my progress, provide general information about Classic era philately and hopefully encourage other "Blue" collectors.
