Dealer posts his stamp of endurance

CITY stamp dealer Max Stern has chosen the date for his retirement. "February 38th," he says with a chuckle. That's right, although he is approaching his 91st birthday, Stern is enjoying work too much to stop now. "Look at this," he says in excitement, showing me a stamped envelope an elderly lady brought in the other day. It carries the name and logo of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and in 1927 it carried a receipt to "Mrs Beatrice Williamson" in Tasmania. "Never seen one of these before," he says. "Not of great value but very interesting."
Among a cluster of certificates and awards on Stern's office wall is a "platinum" citation from the lord mayor recognising his 58 years as a Melbourne city retailer. But we are talking here of former lord mayor John So - the platinum gong is five years old. Stern has now been 63 years at the helm. "The oldest original trader in the city," he says proudly. His first stamp shop was in the Empire Arcade, opposite Flinders Street Station, then, in Melbourne's Olympic year of 1956, he moved to the Port Phillip Arcade nearby, where he has been ever since. Despite new technology's king-hit on the world's postal services, Stern's business continues to boom, now occupying multiple arcade shops and a second floor.
It was back in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, where he was born, that this lifelong love of stamps and coins began. His father, Moses, a haberdasher, bought him an illustrated Schaubek stamp album for his bar mitzvah. "It became a challenge to find the right stamps to fill the pages," says Stern. "In those days, you didn't look at the value, you just wanted stamps from as many different countries as possible." It became his career after March 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria. Stern had been studying engineering in Vienna. "The Germans invaded on a Friday," he recalls, "and I went home to Bratislava on the Saturday. That was end of my engineering studies."