Classic albums
he Latin word translates loosely into English as blank parchment; and that fairly accurately described my first home-made album created when I launched an early foray into stamp collecting as a seven-year-old, not long after the end of the Second World War. Paper; in such short supply we ate takeaway cod-and-chips laid out on sheets of ; could not be spared for stamp collectors, so I had to fall back to the borderline of criminality to create my album. An uncle, lodging with us because his own home had lost an argument with a German bomb, worked as a lowly grade civil servant somewhere around Whitehall. He regularly brought us off-cuts of Colonial drafting paper; a lovely ivory shade with
