Miriam Nason and Margy Davis of M&M Philately specialize in stamps honoring African-Americans. Most of the stamps are foreign. "Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Paul Robeson."

No one comes to San Diego for the stamps. I did. I have been collecting stamps for nearly 40 years, since I was a boy. Yet I have never written about this most private of hobbies, except for the odd poem in which I tried to recapture the boyhood pleasure of journeying to the exotic places on the perforated rectangles in my stock books: places like Ceskoslovensko (Czechoslovakia), Osterreich (Austria), Magyar (Hungary), and Norge (Norway).

Teri Hoefer: “Georgia O’Keeffe said, if you hold a flower in your hand and really look at it, it becomes your world for that moment. I think that’s true of stamps.”

Many of the most serious stamp collectors in San Diego seem to be older citizens, who have acquired their prized specimens over a lifetime. But stamp collecting is for the young as well as the old, and my adventures among San Diego philatelists yielded pleasurable discoveries.

I didn’t have to spend more than a day sleuthing before I lucked into an adventuresome spirit capable of taking stamp collecting — a solitary pastime — and turning it to art. My discovery awaited me last Saint Patrick’s Day at Espresso Roma on College Avenue, near San Diego State University’s campus.

On the walls of the cafe, a student hangout, hung framed collages of stamps. One large assemblage, pasted on a sheet of black paper, was in the shape of a treble clef; another, mounted on silver metallic paper, was in the shape of a teardrop. There were old vinyl 45 rpm records in the center of which the artist had pasted circles within circles of stamps in the manner of a child making paper dolls. One of these works is in fact entitled Paper Dolls; it consists of a row of five discs with stamps in their center arranged to suggest a revolving record. Then there was the untitled piece composed of a yellow disc decorated with a grid pattern of Chinese stamps depicting military men. The effect was powerful and eerie. To sign her works, the artist would make something similar to a small rectangular stamp, inscribe her name in Japanese kanji characters, and add an illustration of a young woman playing the violin.

Martin Luther King Jr. first-day cover signed by Rosa Parks. Companies mass produce such envelopes, but anyone can make one, and many enterprising individuals have taken to creating them in limited editions.

The artist responsible for these philatelic collages, Teri Hoefer, is a 25-year-old SDSU student who also plays electric violin for a rock-and-roll band called Go Go Go Airheart, or sometimes Go Go Go Versus Airheart, or sometimes just Go Air. When not on display at the Espresso Roma on College Avenue, her work can be found at Pasta Espresso, in Pacific Beach, which is owned by one of her three older brothers. A second brother is a doctor with a family practice in El Cajon. On his waiting room wall is her first foray into stamp art, which she calls Traffic Light: three circles of stamps, one circle predominantly green, one red, and one yellow, on a black field. The work was an immediate hit. “My brother’s patients give him their stamps for me,” Hoefer says. “The kids say, ‘Oh, he’s the stamp doctor.’ ”

Larry King (in background) at Henri's Stamp Shop tells me that the recent Elvis Presley stamp caused an increase in customers and that stamps with ships on them are especially popular in San Diego.

Other members of Hoefer’s family also do their part. Her third brother and her mother are pilots with United Airlines — her father, who recently retired, met her mother when he was a pilot and she a flight attendant with the carrier — and they bring back stamps from their foreign destinations. In her father’s case, this meant Japan. “Japanese stamps are so intricate,” Hoefer says. “I like theirs best.”

Hoefer has been making stamp art for two years. When did she start fusing the art of collage and the hobby of stamp collecting? “In junior high school,” she explains, “my violin was broken and I pasted my favorite stamps on it and hung it from my wall.” Hoefer, who began studying classical violin when she was three years old, had a second violin that she felt she could tamper with. “It wasn’t a very expensive violin, and I wanted to accentuate its muffled sound, so I layered it over with stamps, covering the F holes, to mute the sound.”

How did she first get interested in the miniaturist intricacies of postage stamps? “Georgia O’Keeffe is one of my favorite artists,” Hoefer says. “She said, if you hold a flower in your hand and really look at it, it becomes your world for that moment. I think that’s true of stamps.”

So far Hoefer has sold several pieces — one fetched $400 — and given away many more. Treble Clef was a birthday present for her mother. Bluegrass — consisting of long, vertical blue-and-green lines of stamps from Japan, the United States, Australia, Ecuador, the Netherlands, India, Mexico, and elsewhere — was done for the brother who introduced her to bluegrass music. “For a Jewish friend I made a personal album of Israeli stamps. I took one very large stamp with a landscape on it, mounted it on a 45 rpm record, then painted around the stamp to extend the landscape. I like making personal albums. I buy colored vinyl 45s from thrift stores or use some from my own collection.”

Among her most recent works are two that veer off in an expressionist direction. Cloning incorporates news photos of cloned sheep and pictures of monkeys. Three pink paper plates bear the photos along with stamps and dried runs of nail polish. The plates are surrounded by stamps mounted on gold paper. “I recently went vegetarian,” Hoefer explains. “I wonder about the karma of messing with animals.” The use of nail polish is more pronounced in Beneath the Skin. Under a row of stamps are pink and red streams of nail polish, as if to suggest the blood beneath the skin. “I wanted to get rid of my nail polish,” Hoefer says pragmatically, adding that “it’s what’s beneath us, not how we decorate ourselves, that’s important.”

One of the most satisfying of her works is Fabric, in which familiar stamps — Canadian Queen Elizabeths, Australian Queen Elizabeths, U.S. flags, the old Abraham Lincoln four-cent stamp — massed together suggest the dense layers and textures of fabric.

When I set up my meeting with Teri Hoefer, I learned that she didn’t know the work of Donald Evans, the greatest of all stamp artists, so I brought along a book of his work. The artist, who died in an Amsterdam fire 20 years ago at the age of 31, had collected stamps passionately as a boy. He began making his own stamps when he was ten, inventing nations and currencies and fabricating cancellation marks. He strove for verisimilitude in the execution of his stamps as he let his imagination roam free among make-believe countries with fully imagined histories of their own.

Evans suspended his philatelic obsession while studying architecture at Cornell. But after several years of working with a topflight architectural firm, he quit to devote himself full-time to making stamps. He created such countries as “Amis et Amants” (French for “Friends and Lovers”). “Stein,” a twin homage to Holland and Gertrude Stein, issued stamps containing quotations from Stein’s Tender Buttons. “Barcentrum” was famous for its drinks. The country’s “ 1965 issue” of 13 stamps depicted as many different beverages, from coffee to beer. For the “Republic of Domino,” Evans painted a series of 12 stamps, patterning them after his own antique ivory and ebony set.

Evans’s stamps look as if they had been painstakingly removed from the envelopes to which they had been gummed. But the precision was at the service of an ironic and playful sensibility. When the nation of “Mangiare,” famous for its cuisine, was occupied by enemy “Antipasto” forces, Evans created the country’s “1944 occupation issue,” a multicolored set of gastronomic landscapes with the words “Zone Antipaste” superimposed in black lettering, just as French stamps during the German occupation in World War II were overprinted with the words “Zone Francaise.”

In 1975, a political scandal in Honduras was dubbed “Bananagate” in the press. Evans, inspired, made a beautiful set of 20 stamps for his own Central American country, the “Republica de Banana.” Like many of Evans’s creations, this set of stamps is pleasing not only to the eye but to the viewer’s capacity for wonder; a whole country comes to life by a process of philatelic implication. As Willy Eisenhart notes in The World of Donald Evans, ten enigmatic emblems appear on the stamps. “Each of the cryptic national symbols appears twice (each time on the same-colored field but in a different-colored frame). They are a Bananian palm against sky blue, a shiny boot of the presidential guard, a shrimp from the Gulf, the crossed arrows of fraternity tied with a blue ribbon, a rose with thorns, a scorpion with its nippers and stinger, a flag swagged on its staff, an open umbrella, a pear and a ripe banana, the national symbol.” The stamps ranged in “value” from one centavo to ten pesos.

I told Hoefer that Evans perforated the edges of his stamps by typing periods on an old manual typewriter. Hoefer uses a hole puncher and accentuates the effect by spray painting the edges of her signature stamps.

The day after I met Hoefer I sat on the beach in Coronado and wrote her this poem imbued (I hope) with the sight of the ocean and the spirit of Donald Evans:

Pacifica

This set of stamps shows palm trees,

tall and lean and curved near the top,

one palm tree on the one cent stamp,

two on the two, five on the five,

against a backdrop of blue Pacific

and white waves the color of the distant sky,

and if you look carefully you will see

a gull up high and a sail near the horizon.

The lettering on the penny stamp is navy blue,

the two-penny stamp emerald, the five crimson.

These are the stamps of Pacifica,

an island state inhabited mainly by European

expatriates and American soldiers of fortune.

They were issued on March 6, 1972,

in a limited printing of 200 sheets,

and they are very rare, with no set known

to have survived. This is the record

of that little world’s existence, and if I had

a canceled set I’d paste it in the center

of an old vinyl 45 rpm disc, preferably

blue, and give it to you.

My initial expeditions into the world of San Diego stamp collecting were less promising but turned out to be exhilarating in a different manner. I began my researches at Henri’s Stamp Shop, then located in the shopping mall at Mission Valley Center West. (The shop has since moved to San Diego Mission Road.) A sign in the front window announced Henri’s to be “San Diego’s Oldest Established Stamp Store,” dating to 1936. The proprietor of the shop, Larry King, a tall, bewhiskered, dungaree-clad man, hadn’t been overjoyed when I’d phoned him earlier in the day to set up my visit.

“The press always misquotes me,” King said, with the air of one who has often been the subject of journalistic scrutiny and knows all too well the proclivities of the fourth estate. “Every so often the San Diego Union-Tribune calls up and they get everything wrong. It got to the point where I don’t bother with it.” I agreed to his demand that we conduct the interview on his terms: no personal questions, no business questions, and no information about customers and local collectors. Musing about what that left, I asked whether there are any stamps of peculiar interest to San Diegans. There are, it turns out, three such: a 1935 San Diego exposition stamp, a 1961 issue marking the 50th anniversary of naval aviation, and a 1969 stamp celebrating California’s bicentennial. All three had been released in San Diego, and first-day covers of them were available for purchase, the 1961 and ’69 covers for $3, the 1935 cover somewhat more expensive.

A first-day cover is an envelope created to commemorate a stamp’s first day of issue. Companies mass produce such envelopes, but anyone can make one, and many enterprising individuals have taken to creating them in limited editions. On the day the stamp is issued, one must bring the envelope to the officially designated post office, buy the stamp, and have it canceled. At Henri’s I found a particularly attractive cover for the Marilyn Monroe stamp that was issued in Universal City, California, on June 1, 1995. Produced by an outfit called Linrose Cachet, the envelope features a color montage of movie vignettes — including Monroe with her skirt flaring up, Astaire and Rogers, and Orson Welles at a lectern in front of a poster with his face and the name “Kane.” The Monroe stamp bears the cancellation “First Day of Issue, Universal Studios, Hollywood.”

I told King that as a boy I learned basic geography and a fair amount of modern European and colonial history just by collecting stamps. Also, I loved journeying to the places on the perforated rectangles with ships on them or butterflies or birds or Olympic athletes.

King nodded vigorously. “Kids who collect stamps have a thirst for knowledge that other kids don’t have,” he said. “I emphasize the enjoyment of stamps and not their monetary value. The important thing with children is for them to have some sort of interest that exercises their mental ability.”

Indeed. The young collector must at a minimum develop a specialized vocabulary, master a system of classification, and learn the basic methods of removing canceled stamps from envelopes and mounting them with hinges in albums.

There are other reasons that kids and stamp collecting go together, and King enumerated them. “They can learn foreign words,” he said. “It can be done with very little equipment: an album and maybe a magnifying glass. It’s a very inexpensive hobby to start.”

When pressed, King repeated that he didn’t want to talk about stamps as an investment or about the long-term financial rewards of maintaining a collection assiduously. “The truth is, no one knows what stamps will go up. Except me,” he added with a grin. “I have a crystal ball and I know exactly what will go up in price and what won’t. But I’m keeping this information to myself.” Five minutes later King said, “I wish you wouldn’t print that stuff about the crystal ball. For one thing, it isn’t true. For another, I don’t want people knowing that about me.”

When he asked me what I planned to include when I wrote about stamps, I mentioned Stanley Donen’s movie Charade (1964) in which Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Cobum, and George Kennedy search for a missing treasure, which turns out to be hidden in full view: the treasure is a set of stamps on an envelope that the characters continually overlook. Larry King remembered the film. “Its like a modern version of The Purloined Letter,'” he observed.

From Larry King I learned that the recent Elvis Presley stamp caused an increase in customers, that stamps with ships on them are especially popular in San Diego, and that he, a native San Diegan, has been running Henri’s Stamp Shop since he bought it from the original owner “22 or 23 years ago.” From me King learned that I am from New York City, which, it turns out, he visited when he worked in the merchant marine in the early 1960s.

A foxy grin appeared on King’s face. “The last time I was in New York was in 1963. Has anything changed since then?”

Later that day, I walked into the San Diego County Philatelic Library, in a strip mall on Princess View Drive in Allied Gardens. The place is open to the public Monday and Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons. As I entered, I thought for a moment that I had stumbled onto the set of an early Hitchcock movie. There was Oscar Homolka in one chamber with Peter Lorre in another offering to teach me Esperanto. The atmosphere had that combination of the eccentric and the sinister that could make you wonder whether maybe, just maybe, this innocent-looking den was an elaborate spy ring involving the laundering of vast sums of money in transactions of rare stamps. The effect was enhanced when I came upon an arcane book devoted to forgeries in the Netherlands and its former colonies. The book instructs the reader on how to distinguish the spurious from the genuine in rare Dutch stamps.

The man I have identified as Oscar Homolka looked me over suspiciously, wondering what I wanted. I said something about being a stamp collector and asked him about the catalogues on the shelves — thick tomes bearing the names of Scott, Minkus, and Michels, which professional collectors use to determine the up-to-date value of stamps. After five minutes of desultory conversation, I volunteered that I was writing an article about stamps.

“Why didn’t you say that right away?” said the other man, the one I have called Peter Lorre, who didn’t look a bit like Peter Lorre. He was outraged. “I wasn’t lying when I identified myself as a stamp collector,” I said defensively. Though an amateur, I am proud of my collection of mint U.S. plate blocks dating back more than 30 years. (A plate block consists of at least 4 stamps clipped from the corner of a sheet of 50 together with the tab indicating the number of the plate.) “It was improper,” Lorre fumed. Then he thrust his nose back into the book on U.S. postal stationery that he had come to consult. He didn’t say another word for the hour I was there.

The other man now modulated before my eyes from Oscar Homolka to a kind old gentleman named Jerry Lorenzen, a retiree, who wouldn’t say what he used to do for a living but was generous with his information about stamp collecting and San Diego’s philatelic library. The library was founded with the proceeds from one of the city’s annual stamp shows. Twenty-five years of accumulations fill its shelves. A sizable legacy and members’ donations have put $ 100,000 in the library’s coffers. The city’s various stamp clubs — the South Bay Philatelic Society, for example — hold their auctions here. Lorenzen estimates that of the 3000 invitations he and colleagues mail to announce the city’s annual stamp show, a maximum of 200 are to serious collectors who belong to stamp clubs.

Lorenzen, who says he “can’t afford to be a collector,” describes himself as an “internationalist” who prefers canceled stamps, as opposed to stamps in mint condition. “A stamp is a label affixed to the transportation of the mail,” he says. “It’s done its duty when it’s canceled.” He mounts his stamps with hinges in an album he fashioned out of a three-ring binder. When I asked him how he removes the stamps from their envelopes, he grew animated. “First I soak the envelopes in hot water. Then I put them in another water solution to get the balance of the gum off. Then newspaper. Then the drying book. Then I press ’em — I use telephone books for that.”

Lorenzen grew up on the German island of Fohr, near the Danish border. As a boy, he collected Chilean stamps. “Sailors on the saltpeter run from Madagascar to Germany mailed letters from Chile to folks back home. I was 10 or 12 and would knock on doors and say, ‘Do you have any stamps?’ ” He remembered getting “almost a dozen John Ericsson memorial stamps” one day. This was a five-cent American stamp issued in May 1926 to honor Ericsson, the builder of the Monitor; five cents was then the going rate for international mail. That nickel stamp is worth at least $5 used and $10 mint today.

From the San Diego County Philatelic Library it’s another world to the San Diego-based firm of M&M Philately, which specializes in stamps honoring African-Americans. The business is owned and operated by two sisters, Miriam Nason and Margy Davis, who create, as Nason puts it, “museum pieces” in which stamps and related paraphernalia are mounted and framed. For example, a page of sheet music by Duke Ellington shares a frame with first-day covers and loose stamps memorializing the great jazz composer. Measuring 18 by 24 inches, the work sells for $150. For Martin Luther King Jr., the sisters take the sheet music of a song for Dr. King called “Didn’t the Angels Sing?” by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, then add first-day covers and foreign stamps. “Fifty-eight different nations or more have honored Dr. King,” says Nason.

Most of the stamps Nason and Davis deal in are foreign. “There are stamps with athletes and prizefighters on them: Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali. We have Michael Jackson on stamps, we have Paul Robeson on stamps. And there are beautiful stamps honoring women of color.” The frames range from 3 by 5 inches to 18 by 24 inches, with prices varying from $15 to $150.

“We also create bookmarks that we’ve sold nationwide to museums and gift shops,” Nason adds. “There we use color copies of the original stamps, not the stamps themselves, because we laminate the bookmarks, which would ruin the stamps.” The bookmarks go for $2.50 each.

For an exhibition on display at the African-American Museum in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, Nason says that she and Davis created more than 100 frames. The exhibit, which stayed up for five months, remains intact. They would like to sell it to someone with the means to house it permanently or take it on a national tour.

Nason teaches social studies at O’Farrell Community School, a magnet school off Skyline Drive. “When the Buffalo Soldier stamp came out, they had the first-day-of-issue ceremony in Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. It was in April 1994.I told my sixth graders about it, and they all created first-day covers. I took them to the ceremony and got them officially stamped. It was a wonderful way to teach the students about the Buffalo Soldiers.” Who were the Buffalo Soldiers? “They were a black group after the Civil War when the army was segregated. They were a magnificent band of soldiers. The Indians perceived them as very courageous, so they called them ‘Buffalo Soldiers,’ since they had the courage of a buffalo.”

M&M Philately has been in business for ten years. The sisters have traveled from coast to coast, exhibiting their wares in cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Washington, D.C. “We would do at least one conference a month,” says Nason, “and for one we’d make 40 or 50 frames and sell them all. Now we’re back at our regular jobs and don’t have the time or energy to do that.” How did the enterprise get started? “All this happened because of a mistake,” Nason confesses. “My sister put stamps in a frame but left them unmounted. I licked them into place, not realizing I had ruined them. A year later we went out trying to replace the stamps, and what we found opened up a whole world for us. That is also a good lesson for kids.”

I was about to say goodbye when Nason uttered the same sentence that I had heard a few days earlier from Larry King at Henri’s Stamp Shop: “Almost everything you can think of has been pictured on a stamp.” That is one reason why a hobby that seems private has educational uses as well as aesthetic ones. As for stamps as an investment, according to Linn’s U.S. Stamp Market Index, the value of collectible American stamps has appreciated about 14 percent annually over the last five years, roughly keeping pace with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. The aging of the baby boomers and the strength of the U.S. economy help account for the increase in value. “A great many 40- to 50-year-olds who had stamp albums as kids are revisiting the hobby,” Michael Laurence, the editor of Linn’s Stamp News, recently observed. For the wealthy, stamps can provide a sort of portable tax shelter, since profits from stamps are difficult for the IRS to track. Stamps may be the easiest way to transport a fortune across a national border undetected — the Hitchcock fantasy I had while visiting the San Diego County Philatelic Library wasn’t entirely capricious. The collector of stamps, in a society that sets store by throwing things away, more and more resembles a secret agent.

One could do worse than be a collector of stamps.