Brush up on your philatelic knowledge with the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club, a 135-year-old organization keeping postal history alive throughout Cleveland and across the country.

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.

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 ...