In April 2004 Clarrie confessed in the foreword to The Passion and Pitfalls of Pictorial and Commemorative Postmarks – a guide to collecting them that:  Clarrie Peck (23-6-1918 – 26-8-2007), left, about 2004.   From my younger days, I was always a ‘hoarder’ or collector – sports cards, stamps, golf score cards and the like, until a special attraction captured my imagination and interest over the last 20 odd years … pictorial postmarks on cover. This fascinating and absorbing hobby almost became an obsession which led me to compile and produce an illustrated handbook on such postmarks. As well as time-consuming, the enthusiastic and ‘magnetic’ effect of this hobby on one’s life also creates miracles in overcoming such things as boredom and loneliness, and I recommend the hobby to any person of any age as one worthy of your time and effort. That ‘illustrated handbook on such postmarks’ was in fact unique and filled a gaping hole in the fabric of philatelic history in Australia. Without Clarrie’s book and the enormous work it grew into, it is doubtful that any meaningful record of the pictorial and commemorative postmarks used in this country since 1879 would exist today. Others produced the odd book here and there, but Clarrie’s not only illustrated the postmark, it gave details of its size, the number of cancels done and a brief outline of why the postmark was produced, crucial to Australia’s social and cultural history.

Clarrie's first edition (pictured) is highly collectible in its own right. Peck's New Look Pictor-Marks actually became a world standard, and a search on Google today will still reveal Clarrie’s numbering system when people research these highly specialised postmarks, although Clarrie himself adopted the ‘APM’ system. Clarrie identified five different types of pictorial and commemorative postmarks in common use in Australia, and it was he who set up the original system to identify them. His knowledge was formidable. Ask him a question like . . . Clarrie, someone said there's a postmark with a wombat in it. Do you know of one? Naturally, Clarrie would be able to answer the question off the top of his head and tell you that there were in fact at least half a dozen pictorial postmarks featuring wombats! And he was right 99.999% of the time!

Even more remarkable was that Clarrie compiled what became a two volume work of around 800 pages illustrating more than 6000 postmarks and probably a thousand or so more allied illustrations using only a typewriter, a pair of scissors, a pot of glue and a good old clunky photocopier. The only reason he gave it up in 1999 was that his hands were too arthritic to cope with the typing. Not being able to type didn’t mean he wasted the prodigious amount of information in that brain of his. He continued as resident guru to Australian PictorMarks. Clarrie’s impact on Australian philately, and marcophily in particular, can never be overestimated and we miss him.