Generally Speaking

In the summer of 2009, award-winning novelist Lawrence Block began contributing a monthly column to Linn's Stamp News, America's leading philatelic publication. A collector as a boy and young man, Block had returned to the hobby in the 1990s. Before long he had begun writing about stamps when one of his characters, an assassin-for-hire named Keller, took up philately so he'd have something to do in his impending retirement.Collectors can probably imagine what became of Keller's retirement fund; it dwindled even as his collection thrived, and he's gone on to star in four novels—Hit Man, Hit List, Hit Parade, and Hit & Run—with a fifth, Hit Me, coming from Mulholland Books in 2013.Block's column, "Generally Speaking," quickly became one of Linn's most popular features. It consists of the reflections and observations of a general worldwide collector—the author, like Keller, collects the whole world during philately's first century, 1840 to 1940, plus British Empire through the reign...