EXPLORING STAMPS
Graham Beck is the person behind the philatelist’s favourite YouTube channel, ‘Exploring Stamps’. Belying the idea that stamp collecting is a hobby for fogeys who prefer collating stamps in paper albums in real life to engaging with the virtual world, from his base in New Jersey Graham uses his video content to create short, highly engaging videos that display all the aspects of why he believes collecting stamps really is, as he puts it, ‘the King of Hobbies’.
Graham first got into stamps when he was a child in South Africa.
‘My friend, Jerrit, introduced me to his stamp collection when I was eight years old,’ he remembers. ‘Together we would go to the local stamp shop and spend our pocket money on new issues at the time. I was always impressed with how organised his collection was, and so I put tremendous effort in alphabetizing the countries in my four stockbooks. I also enjoyed soaking stamps off the torn corners of envelopes that my family saved for me, this would give me hours of joy on a weekend.’ But when he moved from
