Absentee Exhibiting and the EXPONET by Peter Thy

If you are exhibiting your collections, you may have been in the same situation and dilemma as myself. Recently I prepared two of my collections for a national show. One was a multipage exhibit containing the postal card section of my Bechuanalands stationery collection. The other was a one frame collection concerned with the postal history of the African Pioneer Corps inWorld War 2. I entered both exhibits at a stampshow on the east coast and later decided that I could not attend the show in person.

Thus, I became in effect an absentee exhibitor according to current exhibit terminology. I must admit that this surprised me a bit at fi rst. I had always thought that the majority of exhibitors would not attend in person and would only be represented by their exhibit(s). The fact, I now understand, is that stampshows are organized and structured with the premise that exhibitors mostly attend in person. As an absentee exhibitor, I will be unable directly to interact with judges and other visitors and will not attend or give seminars. Therefore, I will not contribute to all what makes stampshows philatelic successes. What is perhaps more important, considering that dealers basically pay for the show, I will not be able to visit and spend my money at the commercial bourse. At the personal level, however, I miss the opportunity to attend the judges critique and award ceremony and eventually to drag an otherwise innocent judge to my exhibit frames to complain and plead a perceived unjust medal level. Written award justifi cations are strangely still not provided for multiframe exhibits. This is in contrast to literature and single frame exhibits for which written justifi cations are provided (despite very brief). Thus an absentee exhibitor is often intentionally left in the dark.

In my case the result was that I had literally no clue to why my fi ve frame exhibit was signifi cantly downgraded compared to previous shows. In contrast, I knew pretty much why my one frame had been upgraded and also what I could do to improve the award level next time around. If it had not been for one of the judges that, despite having not directly been involved in thejudging of my exhibit, was graciously enough to detail his impressions in an subsequent email to me, I would still have had no idea of what went wrong. There clearly is a need for improvement in judging procedures at stampshows. It it fair to expect prospective exhibitors to pay the frame fees and express mailing expenses (easily $ 150 - 200 for a national show) and then simply to receive ones exhibit returned in the mail with a medal, but without explanations? It are often argued that even the absentee exhibitor will benefit from show visitors that see the exhibit and provide personal feedback after the show. Admittedly, this happens occasionally but rarely. The fact is that I have had far more response to my writings in philatelic journals than in response to showing my collections at shows. The obvious question an absentee (or perhaps any exhibitor) will ask is whether it is worth the expenses and effort?

Recently, I have been thinking about how to further show my exhibits and to reach out to follow collectors with the same interests as myself. Some years ago, I produced an electronic version of my one-frame of Bechuanaland postal orders that won a gold at the 1998 AMERISTAMP EXPO in Houston. I made it into a printed booklet and also put a pdf version on the internet where it still can be downloaded from www.kronestamps.dk. The result is that my Bechuanaland postal order exhibit is very well known among similarly inspired collectors. Several philatelic websites have exhibits posted on their sites. The most prominent of these is the EXPONET organized and maintained by a non-profit organization with close ties to organized philately in the Czech Republic. The purpose of EXPONET is to provide a “place you may use to present your virtual postal history and philatelic collections. It is intended as a public display of all philatelic areas and time periods in English, German, Spanish or other languages. The aim of the organizers of EXPONET is to provide a permanent presentation of high quality stamp and philatelic exhibits so as to facilitate on-line study for visitors throughout the world. We do not intend to compete with traditional classic exhibits, but rather to enable on-line viewing to everybody, regardless of distance, and thus take part in the support and propagating of philately.”

The internet address is http://www.exponet.info. At present there are 300 exhibits on line from 33 different countries. Over sixty of these originated in the US. There are over 1,500 framesand 22,000 pages with an average of 80 pages per exhibit. The countries (origin of exhibitor) represented are Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bolivia, Brazil. Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and USA. The subject areas and thematic diversity of the exhibits are more diffi cult to evaluate because of the lack of an index and search feature (a shortcoming that the organizers are aware of). Some random subjects/areas include Argentina’s Classic Issues, Willem III Issues of Netherlands Indies, East Saxony 1945-46, Variable Rate Stamps, Bangladesh Postal History, and the USS Oregon. The exhibits are organized into the classes Traditional Philately, Postal history, Postal Stationery, Aero- and Astrophilately,Thematic, Revenue, Literature, Youth, and an Open Class. There is no requirement that an exhibit on EXPONET has previously been shown at a national or international show. First time I looked, there were no exhibits with direct southern Africa connections, but now my six exhibits have been posted (see next page) with hopefully others to follow. But now what about my dilemma. Should I give up traditional philatelic exhibits and concentrate on electronic exhibits? It is about the same amount of work. Any comments to guide my decision?

From FORERUNNERS - JOURNAL OF THE PHILATELIC SOCIETY FOR GREATER SOUTHERN AFRICA, Affiliated with the American Philatelic Society and the Philatelic Federation of Southern Africa, Volume XXI, Number 3, Whole No. 61 March-June 2008

All text >>>>> http://www.japhila.cz/exponet/pictures/exponetFR61.pdf
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Notice by Bret Janik, Exponet:
August 05, 2008 - Exponet Statistics: 406 on line exhibits from 40 different countries, more than 2,000 frames (4 x 4) and more than 34,000 pages with an average of 77 pages per exhibit (without philatelic literature)...