Book on Philately of Pakistan

To most of the readers of blog this topic might seem strange and many would not be able to know the meaning of the word Philately, but those who collect postage stamps would know that this word means the hobby of collecting postage stamps is also know as philately, as the word numismatic means the study or collection of currency. So, I became a philatelist when my father started giving me stamps from the mails that he was getting from the business mail that he was maintaining when we had moved to Dhaka, in 1960. At that time Dhaka was a part of Pakistan.

I had a friend who was also a philatelist and we used to exchange the duplicate stamps to make our collection of stamps consists of as many different and distinct stamps as possible. Having duplicates does not increase the collection’s worth. Countries all over the world have a policy to issue some kind of envelopes or flyers on the date of public release of all postage stamps and stationary, like post card aerograms. These items are now becoming rare as hardly any body uses regular mail for correspondence. Email or text messages has removed the fun of correspondence. We used to go to the local post office to get these envelopes known as “First Day Covers”, buy the new stamps and get the postal mark on the stamps showing sometime special text and the date of issue for the postage stamp. The postage stamps were/are also issued to commemorate any special national or international events like “World Health Day”, “Freedom from Hunger”, in support of national or international campaigns, in honor of national or international living or dead personalities and for various other special events. These items were only popular with stamp collectors or philatelists in the respective countries or world wide.

To provide this information to the local and international philatelists and to the young/old persons who wanted to exchange letters with “pen pals” in various countries I started a monthly publication known as “Orient Ways” and started a club known as “Oriental Philatelic International”.

When the 25th anniversary of the Independence of Pakistan was approaching I and my friend decided that we should also celebrate this with a spacial First Day Cover from our stamp club. After getting my first column published in Daily Dawn, I started writing on my hobby of stamp collecting and my columns were being published in various newspapers almost every week. I thought, that I could collect all the published columns, add a few more and publish a book on the 25th Anniversary. Naturally the appropriate title for the book was “25th Anniversary of Philately in Pakistan”. I designed the book cover, typed the manuscript and got hold of the proprietor of a local national newspaper to write the introduction and then took it to a printer who became family friend. He told me that I have to “proof read” the book, as in the 70’s in Pakistan the printers were using the process of type-setting, similar to characters used in old type-writers that were fixed to “compose” a page and then the impression put on a paper using ink and then it read by proof readers and errors were type-setting errors were marked and had to corrected. This process had to be repeated until all errors were removed. I had to make at least one trip to the printer every other day for proof-reading and then bringing paper to print 4- 16 pages of the book, as neither the printer was ready to print the complete book nor I had the money to buy the printing paper. I had to take the printed copies of the book ( 1 sheet of paper had four pages one one side and the other 4 pages on the other side) after the whole book was printed in a cab to the shop that will cut it and bind them in a book form. got the book published with the monetary help from one of my uncle, using some of my own pocket money and the printing cost as a “loan” from the printer,