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The surprising thing about Sidney, is that it's become the world headquarters of stamp collecting. This is a little known fact, even in Sidney, where the Chamber of Commerce's Bea DeLoye gets more inquiries about Wagnerware -- locally made cast-iron pans -- than about anything else.
Actually, Sidney has no more stamp collectors than other places -- though it does have some extraordinary and ordinary collections -- and it's not home to the world's elite dealers. What it does have is the Amos Press, which now dominates philatelic publishing in news, in marketing, in stamp identification and authentication. Stamp collectors are isolated individuals, and they find their community -- their goals and rules, forums, esteem -- through publications.
As a place, Sidney has more going for it than stamps. It has 17,657 people and four exits off I-75, midway between Dayton and Lima. It has a courthouse whose tower clock not only runs but is almost on time, and a courthouse square without a single boarded-up window. There is a Louis Sullivan bank on the courthouse square -- a a bank with THRIFT inscribed in the blue glass mosaic of a Syrian arch over the door, across from the bank is a 1941 art moderne restaurant called the Spot, where everyone orders the pie. Then, too, there are factories in Sidney, factories that are working. For six years there was an idle plant, Myojo Foods near the highway. It was built about 1980 to make Japanese noodles, and somehow, as Bea DeLoye says, that "just didn't materialize." By this summer, though, Campbells Soup had moved in and was getting ready for production. There is a market for Japanese noodles after all.
To get to Amos Press, you take the I-75 exit for Route 47 and pick up Vandemark Road just west of the highway. You turn south between Burger King and McDonald's, pass Country-mark and the Sidney Farm Center, and Amos Press comes up on the right. Locally, it's known for The Sidney Daily News. Philatelically, it's been known for a long time for Linn's Stamp News ("world's largest stamp news and marketplace"), a tabloid paper that every Friday sends 76,000 copies around the world -- to Cuba, to Russia, to Germany, says staffer Jeannette...