Hobbies: Oh Dag, Poor Dag

The sticky, squint-eyed world of the stamp collector was rocked to its very perforations last week. It was a flurry over a flaw, and as every one of the U.S.'s more than 13 million stamp collectors knows, a flaw is worth far more than perfection. Rarity is, of course, the touchstone by which all stamps are valued; but more often than not, a rare stamp is different from millions of its counterparts only because it has some technical disfigurement. To the tweezer-and-magnifying-glass set, discovery of such minor imperfections as missing watermarks or...