A glassed-in wall case held two shotguns and a rifle, their stocks elaborately tooled, their barrels agleam with menace. I suppose they were for shooting turkeys but they’d do in a pinch for shooting burglars and I didn’t like the looks of them.

Over the desk, an Audubon print of an American wild turkey hung in an antiqued frame. The real thing, stuffed and mounted and looking only a little forlorn, stood guard atop the bookcase. I suppose its friend J.C. shot it. First he’d have honked with one of the odd-looking wooden turkey lures he had on display, and then he’d have triggered the shotgun, and now the creature had achieved a sort of taxidermal immortality. Oh, well. People who break into houses, glass or otherwise, probably shouldn’t cast stones. Or aspersions, or whatever.

In any event, the turkeys and the guns and the books were beside the point. Along the back of the large desk, below the Audubon turkey, ranged a dozen dark green volumes a bit over a foot high and a couple of inches wide. They were Scott Specialty Stamp Albums, and they were just what the burglar ordered. British Asia, British Africa, British Europe, British America, British Oceania. France and French Colonies. Germany, German States and German Colonies. Benelux. South and Central America. Scandinavia. And, in an album which did not match its fellows, the United States.

I went through one album after another. Appling’s stamps were not affixed to the page with hinges but were encased individually in little plastic mounts designed for the purpose. (Hinging a mint stamp is as economically unsound as discarding a book’s dust jacket.) I could have removed the plastic mounts, and thought about it, but it was faster and simpler and subtler to tear whole pages from the loose-leaf binders, and that’s what I did.

I know a little about stamps. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I can skim through an album and make good spot decisions as to what to take and what to leave.