Because of how ridiculously popular they were, there are tons of these unused books around middle America just waiting to be sold to collectors ... grandparents' old green stamps online.

Why? A good guess is that stamp collecting, or philately, was seen as a splendid way for young people — like newspaper clerks — to learn history by osmosis. The Times’s album testifies to ...

Collecting stamps can be as easy as pulling a stamp off an envelope delivered by mail or as complicated as studying historical events to find a particularly rare or coveted one.