Learning about Stamps - symbols and secrets

In this book, I explore stamps from as far back as 1935, stamps from islands far away and nations on the other side of the planet. I share stamps with a tragic Belgian queen and powerful Antarctic snow crawlers, majestic sailing ships and wild horses protecting themselves on a remote island, a chick that makes us think about farming ethics and a revolutionary stamp within a stamp. For each stamp, I searched online to find out its date and specifications, then used an AI agent to find more facts and details to explore. I didn't just want to be a collector of pretty things, but a researcher, an investigator, a lifelong learner. For as much of my life as I can remember, I have always been curious, wondering why people do what they do, or why something matters to other people. So, I put to work a very talented online investigator, Claude AI by Anthropic, and together we dug through the internet in search of answers to my questions.

The stamps you'll discover in these pages come in shapes you might never have imagined: a triangle from the USSR celebrating Soviet Antarctic exploration, rectangles from nations across the globe, and diamonds from Hungary commemorating Olympic javelin throwers. You'll encounter words in languages spanning the globe: German and Spanish, Cyrillic and Romanian, Hungarian and Croatian. Some stamps showcase humanity's creations, like Victorian penny farthing bicycles racing through Czechoslovakia, early personal computers from 1980s West Germany, graceful gliders soaring above Romania, and magnificent sailing ships visiting New York Harbor. Others celebrate nature's gifts, like the endangered Corroboree Frog with its bold yellow and black stripes, wild Sable Island horses with their shaggy coats facing harsh Atlantic winds, yellow birds perched on flowering branches, and a powerful rhinoceros standing in Cuban zoos. We'll meet Beethoven with his intense composer's gaze on a Hungarian stamp, discover Miniature Schnauzers with their distinguished bearded faces, and witness the birth of a nation through Tanganyika's independence stamp. Each stamp is a window into a different corner of our remarkable world.

Sometimes I was perplexed about one of my questions. Some just didn't want to yield themselves to the demands of inquiry, but I persevered. When Claude had trouble finding a particular stamp, I dug until I found it. When I couldn't translate Cyrillic or German, Claude jumped at the task, though sometimes I just went to Google Translate. And best of all, when I would recognize an important topic deriving from a stamp, I would task Claude with helping me research until I felt that I had learned enough to make the adventure worth having. Thirty chapters and thirty adventures, each with new understandings of the people around the world across many generations. From Queen Astrid's heartbreaking story of love and loss to the triumph of Polish wolves recovering from near-extinction, from the ethical questions raised by a simple yellow chick to the engineering marvels of Antarctic exploration vehicles, every stamp revealed layers of meaning I never imagined when I first held it in my hand.