Hitting the Jackpot, MY Style

This past Friday evening, I headed back to Briggs Auction with my mother, visiting for the weekend from Kentucky.  (Remember, I was there the previous weekend buying chickens and marbles with my husband!)  We were single-minded in our goal to walk out of there with postage stamps for our art-making, and we were NOT disappointed!

In the five years I've been going to this auction on-and-off, I have only brought home postage stamps on one other occasion.  I thought it might be too much to hope for that they would be offering stamps on the particular weekend my mother was coming with me.  But we truly hit the jackpot.

When we got home on Friday evening, we sat with glasses of wine, sorting through all the stamps.  If we saw something we wanted, we would hold it out to each other and say, "Can I have this one?  Can I have this one?"  The ones we didn't want, we put into piles to hand over to each other.  We had quite a system going.

My share of the postal haul abundantly fills two cigar boxes; my mom carried her share home in a gallon plastic bag to make it easier to take on the plane. 

In addition, I brought home a stamp collector's book.  He glued the stamps directly to the page so they cannot be removed.  However, as far as I'm concerned, the pages themselves are awesome art!

They present such an interesting view of history, often including countries that don't even exist anymore, or countries that were once colonial holdings.

Each stamp is a work of art.

Tucked in with the stamp album was an envelope holding several old stock certificates from 1884:

I think the items I bid on must have all come from the same estate, a man who used to be in the U.S. Navy.  In addition to the stamps, the lot included:

Postcards of San Francisco

A certificate declaring Charles Lee, Jr., as Honor Man at the U.S Naval Training Station in Bainbridge, Maryland, for the period of training completed May 16, 1946.

The certificate included a handwritten list of various names on the back.

Some extremely spooky photographs of the nuclear weapons tests in the Bikini Atoll

A naval training booklet and group photo, with smaller versions of the Bikini Atoll photos and a book entitled A BlueJackets' Manual for the US Navy from 1944.  Now I can be prepared for hammock inspection, using inflated trousers as a float to rescue myself in case of emergency, what to do in case I am taken prisoner by the enemy, and how to conduct myself during military drills!

Another training class photo from 1946

What an abundance of treasures!  What is your favorite?  And how would YOU put these findings to creative use?