"John Varley - Anthology - Super Heroes - Various Authors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Superheroes Mean to Me." And with a title like that there's just no other
place to start with than the Littleton Stamp Company of Littleton, Colorado.
Which is exactly where we will start, except for a brief digression to
mention my aunt, who was a librarian in Portland, Oregon, and who for
many years tore the foreign stamps off all the letters that came into the
library until one day, possibly alarmed at the way her desk drawers were
bulging, she dumped them all into boxes and shipped them off to me, in
Texas.
I kind of liked them. And when the rest of my family heard this, a few
other relatives promptly sent me the stamps they had been hoarding for years
because they were too pretty to throw away and besides, maybe they're
worth something. (I've since learned that every family sooner or later selects
someone to be known as "the stamp nerd," usually a thin, studious male
with thick glasses. Except for the specs, I fit the part. Thus are philatelists
born.)
I bought a stamp album, learned to soak the stamps off the
John Varley
paper backing, and started pasting them into their proper places.
Enter the Littleton Stamp Company. This firm advertised on matchbook
covers and in comic books. The gist of the ad was they would send you 500
(or 700, or maybe it was 1,000) stamps, all different, FREE!!!!, if you just
sent them a self-addressed, stamped envelope, (anslexusastmpsnaprval)
Eh? What was that? The print was so small and it went by so fastтАж it
must have been the wind. Did you hear anything? Never mind.
wewillalsoincludeaselectionofstampsohapproval
Hah? Speak up, will you? Heck, I'm sure I didn't hear anything, and even
if I did, I don't know what "on approval" means, and anyway, I'm sure not
going to let it stand in the way of my 1,000 (I'm sure it was a thousand)
FREE!!! all-different stamps from twenty-five (count 'em) countries.
So I fixed four-cent stamps to two envelopesтАФthereby cruelly dating
myself to my readers in 1994тАФposted the letter, and sat back to wait.
The results exceeded my wildest dreams. The Littleton Stamp Company
paid off like a slot machine from hell. There were at least 1,000 stamps on
paper stuffed into a big bag (there were a lot of duplicates, but who cared?).
Looking through them, I soon concluded there were a lot of librarian aunts
out there, and not all of them had a designated stamp geek to send their
hoarded treasures to. Obviously, they were selling them to the Littleton
Stamp Company. Which, in turn, was giving them away in the mailтАж
Did I feel the first chill of doubt then? Hard to remember. Even at that
tender age I think I'd concluded that people seldom just gave things away.
On the other hand, I knew a lot of people thought of these little bits of paper
as nothing more than trash. So maybe it was true.
For whatever reason, I put my doubts away and returned to the
examination of the treasure trove. And here I discovered something entirely
unexpected. In addition to the wads and wads of stamps torn from
envelopes, there were these cunning little glassine envelopes. Inside the
envelopes, which were
Introduction printed with legends like "10 Madagascar."
"15 Switzerland."
"4 Kenya," and "24 Germany," were by far the best stamps of all. These