Table By the Window = Sun Damage

The Money Pit in San Marcos, CA is a great burger & hot dog & breakfast places with reasonable prices.  The interior design is amazing, with wlls full of movie and other memorabilia about money, and every table has a custom design utilizing some aspect of currency or economics.  There are tables done up with foreign paper money, stock certificates, cards and casino chips, stamps, coins, and more.  Even the floors have old silver coins embedded in the grout, and there is a full-sized bank safe embedded in the floor.  It looks great and has a unique feel to it.  And good food.



This table by the window has a nice selection of worldwide stamps.  Stamps as a part of life, back when stamps really were a part of day-to-day living.  After a minute, I noticed that this was also a perfect laboratory example of how sun damage affects different stamps.  It's right up against a west-facing window, beneath a thick plastic layer, so it has been baking in the sun for at least a decade.

It's interesting how some of the stamps have survived almost unchanged, where others have been sun-bleached to blank white scraps but the ink of the cancellation is still there.  I'm not sure why some of them appear to be burned.  Quite possibly, they really did begin to smolder.  Sunlight through a maginifying glass can get the edges of paper to curl and smoke, or even ignite.

You couldn't set up a science experiment any better than this.  Some inks fade, some papers scorch, and you can see how time beats down out our little precious artifacts...


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