Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born in St Petersburg on February the 2nd, 1905. She was the eldest of three daughters born to a bourgeois family, the head of which was their pharmacist father. Rand reportedly found school very dull and not at all challenging, and began writing at the age of 8.
Despite being one of many ‘bourgeois’ students who were initially expelled from university, Rand graduated Petrograd State University in October, 1924. After studying at State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad, Rand decided to change her name to the one she is now know best for- Ayn Rand. She took influence for her forename either from Aino, a Finnish name, or from the Hebrew word ayin, which means “eye”.
As a child of 10 years old Ayn Rand collected stamps, stopped during her adult life, and took it back up as a hobby during her late middle age. Stamp collecting is not the first thing to come to mind when discussing Rand but it did become a major passion of hers.
Rand as a child
A teenage Rand
In 1971 Ayn Rand wrote freely about her hobby of stamp collecting in an article published in the Minkus Stamp Journal (Vol. VI, No. 2). In it she discusses the philosophical and practical reasons for collecting stamps in her intelligent and eloquent way.
Below we include some excerpts from her article, and a link to purchase the full journal (US only).
The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honour in 1999 (pictured right).
“I started collecting stamps when I was ten years old, but had to give it up by the time I was twelve. In all the years since, I never thought of resuming the hobby. It left only one after-effect: I was unable to throw away an interesting-looking stamp. So, I kept saving odd stamps, all these years. I put them into random envelopes and never looked at them again.
Then, about a year-and-a-half ago, I met a bright little girl named Tammy, who asked me … somewhat timidly, but very resolutely … whether I received letters from foreign countries and, if I did, would I give her the stamps. I promised to send her my duplicates. She was eleven years old, and so intensely serious about her collection that she reminded me of myself at that age.
Once I started sorting out the stamps I had accumulated, I was hooked.
The pleasure lies in a certain special way of using one’s mind. Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people … because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world.
A career requires the ability to sustain a purpose over a long period of time, through many separate steps, choices, decisions, adding up to a steady progression toward a goal. Purposeful people cannot rest by doing nothing nor can they feel at home in the role of passive spectators. They seldom find pleasure in single occasions, such as a party or a show or even a vacation, a pleasure that ends right then and there, with no further consequences.
The minds of such people require continuity, integration, a sense of moving forward. They are accustomed to working long-range; to them, the present is part of and a means to the future; a short-range event or activity that leads nowhere is an unnatural strain on them, an irritating interruption or a source of painful boredom.
Yet they need relaxation and rest from their constant, single-tracked drive. What they need is another track, but for the same train … that is, a change of subject, but using part of the same method of mental functioning.
Credit: Art On Stamps
Stamp collecting is an adjunct of, not a substitute for, a career. A career requires problem-solving … creative problems, technical problems, business problems, etc. Stamp collecting requires a full, focused attention, but no problem-solving; it is a process of cashing in on the given and known. If one makes it a substitute for productive work, it becomes an empty escape; an unproductive mind does not need rest.
The course of a career depends on one’s own action predominantly, but not exclusively. A career requires a struggle; it involves tension, disappointments, obstacles which are challenging, at times, but are often ugly, painful, senseless … particularly, in an age like the present, when one has to fight too frequently against the dishonesty, the evasions, the irrationality of the people one deals with. In stamp collecting, one experiences the rare pleasure of independent action without irrelevant burdens or impositions. Nobody can interfere with one’s collection, nobody need be considered or questioned or worried about. The choices, the work, the responsibility … and the enjoyment … are one’s own. So is the great sense of freedom and privacy.
But … it is asked … why not collect cigar bands, or coins, or old porcelain? Why stamps?
Because stamps are the concrete, visible symbols of an enormous abstraction: of the communications net embracing the world.
Stamp collecting gives one a large-scale view of the world … and a very benevolent view. One feels: no matter how dreadful some of mankind’s activities might be, here is a field in which men are functioning reasonably, efficiently and successfully. (I do not mean the political set-up involved, I mean the technical aspects and skills required to deliver the world’s gigantic tonnage of mail.)
Speaking aesthetically, I should like to mention the enormous amount of talent displayed on stamps … more than one can find in today’s art galleries. Ignoring the mug shots of some of the world’s ugliest faces (a sin of which the stamps of most countries are guilty), one finds real little masterpieces of the art of painting. In this respect, the stamps of Japan are consistently the best. But my personal favorites are two smaller countries whose stamps are less well known: Ryukyu Islands and Iceland. If this were a competition, I would give first prize, for beauty of design, to two stamps of Iceland that feature stylized drawings of trees.
In conclusion, I want to say a personal “thank you” to a man whose extremely generous interest and guidance have helped me to find my way in a very complex field: Mr. Jacques Minkus. The infectiously irresistible enthusiasm he projects for the world of stamps, and the glamor of the philatelic establishment he has created give him an unusual position in today’s cheerless world: the head of an empire dedicated to human enjoyment.”
~Ayn Rand~
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