With the thumb and index finger of your right hand, you pick up a pair of round-tipped, six-inch, ‘professional length’ philatelic tweezers and carefully extract the final stamp on the plastic display page from its rectangular compartment. Then you take the frameless acrylic-lensed magnifying glass in your left hand and examine the stamp carefully. It’s a 1961 50 lire Italian issue bearing the legend X CONGRESSO FILATELICO DI CORTINA D’AMPEZZO and the subject matter of the stamp is in fact a representation of the 1952 10 lire issue celebrating the I CONGRESSO FILATELICO DI CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, a rhetorical flashback as it were. The 1952 stamp is itself being handled by tweezers which, by an effect of dramatic perspective, intrude boldly but only partially into the frame of the 1961 stamp from the bottom right-hand corner of the ‘canvas’, causing the commemorated 1952 stamp to cast a crisp drop shadow on the background of the parent stamp. The 1952 stamp being wielded by the truncated tweezers depicts a young philatelist (a boy), tweezers in hand, seated at an ornate desk in a book-lined study and earnestly examining a minute and obviously unidentifiable specimen under the paternalistic surveillance of a pipe-smoking gentleman who rests his left hand on the boy’s shoulder. (In order to prolong the vertigo, you imagine that this final insubstantial and undelineated postage stamp represents, say, the violet 6 pfennig + 24 pfennig German Third Reich stamp issued for Stamp Day (Tag der Briefmarke) in 1942, which depicts an adult male philatelist, tweezers in his right hand and magnifying glass in his left, occupied with a specimen from his open stamp-album next to which is visible in the foreground of the composition a globe of the earth bissected by the border of the stamp.)