Several months ago I was visiting my parents at their house and my dad showed me a notebook that his dad, my grandpa, had put together years ago. It was a simple brown binder with no label or identifier on the cover, but upon opening it I found a certificate awarding a gold medal to my grandpa for its contents.
Before I go on, you have to know this about my grandpa: he was a collector. He collected books (hundreds? thousands?), rocks (and cut and polished them), iris (and belonged to a garden society), antique blue and white plates (which hung all over the kitchen walls), and stamps. He was most proud of his Queen Elizabeth stamps, but he collected all kinds. And he spent hours putting together his stamp collections into neat, orderly pages in binders.
It turns out that the brown binder that contained the gold medal certificate was another of these stamp collections! Inside was an exhibit of “Musical Themes from Great Composers” that he presented at the Second A.T.A. Topical Stamp Exhibition in 1953. Each page contains one or more stamps depicting a classical composer, a typed short bio of the composer, a brief description of the stamp's origin, and a hand-written excerpt of a composition written by the composer.
It was this last bit that caught my dad's attention. My grandpa was not a musician, and to our knowledge he had no formal musical training; yet the copied music is meticulously rendered in black ink with all the proper formatting and no mistakes. The attention to detail is astonishing.
I don't know if there is any “use” for these pages any more, but as a part of my family history - and the fact that both my dad and myself became accomplished pianists - the binder is a wonderful treasure to us.
Here are a few of the pages:
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