Collecting Criteria & What to Collect?

The Seahorses are lovely stamps but getting oh so pricey! I'm watching for nice copies at reasonable prices on SAN and other sites; may be a while before I find ones I like and can afford.

Thanks for your comments, Paul, very well said, indeed!  For what it's worth, I heartily agree with you and find myself in a very similar frame of mind.

When I collected in my youth, I wanted everything.  I was a WW collector, no limits on eras, and I saw myself as getting a copy of every stamp in existence, the Count Ferrari of the modern era.... Talk about being delusional! 

Then like most of us here on TSF, I didn't do much with my collection during my young adult years (my twenties), although I did continue to accumulate stamps, mostly buying at post offices when I was on overseas travel.  By my early thirties, I came across my stamps when I made a cross-country move, and that got me going again.  At first, I decided just to collect pre-1940 U.S. stamps, and I did that for a few years.

But then at a local stamp club meeting, I ended up buying an old international album published around 1930, and that made me a WW collector again, but with limited time period.  I have since stopped using that album for putting stamps into, but the time period of interest has stuck, and I am now firmly a classics collector.

I learned through recent posts here on TSF that my collecting criteria are perhaps different from many of you.  For the most part, I like the designs of the stamps, so I want copies that are nicely centered and have good color.  Contrary to my early focus on unused stamps, I don't mind used stamps at all these days, but for used stamps, I am looking for lightly cancelled, unobtrusive postmarks, so that the stamp design is clear.

Postmarks are important and interesting in their own rite, and are a focus/priority for many of you.  I appreciate and respect that, and I now keep stamps just for their postmarks, but I still want the material in my primary collection to showcase the stamps themselves.  I will keep the interesting postmarks separately.

OK, enough rambling from me for the moment....

I would go with a collection of nice and very pricey stamps as a Wallpaper !! Excellent  idea Mark !! I was looking for a nice Canada #1 Beaver this week (and last) - all sold mostly in $US - our Canadian $ is below 70 cents - too expensive and it will end up with my other Canada stamps in the Custom Album. My late dad's Seaway Inverted (Sc 387a), bought in 1985 for $10,000....ended up in a safety deposit box at the Bank for years until I sold it and made $5,000 profit and the deposit box is closed !

tobben63 said
Same for me, quite rarely in real life.
However I'm creating a virtual and purely "Classical WW collection", made up of images from my albums, containing only the first few classical-era pages for each country (up until year 1900 or so). This (photo-)album is available on my skydrive, and I enjoy having a look at that every now and then, in particularly when I am away from my collection while at work offshore.

I often go through the existing collection including turning album pages and reviewing stockbook leaves, this is done on average at least once every fortnight. Having read some articles on the care and preservation aspects of collecting, it is probably not a bad idea e.g. silverfish (yeesh).

There is a certain joy experienced from looking at my collection and what I have been able to build thus far; ah, the simple pleasures. There is a reason one collected this little bits of coloured paper to begin with and I do relish the time spent looking at them: colours, perforations, watermarks and of course the imagery. One can always pass time in the "now" with existing but at the same time, one can get distracted. With magnifying glass in hand, thoughts for new material looking at perceived "holes", not those caused by silverfish, but gaps in the collection that could be filled, a new cliché found discovered in the morning light or a random thought that sends the mind traveling as spawned by an stamp's image.

I like the real; it is why I collect, what I collect and at the same time, keeps me engaged in the hobby...


Happy collecting!

I look through all my albums at least once a month. Often to search for items to scan (there are many). I usually clean the albums at the same time as well as the Shelves/cupboards they reside in. I thought it was normal ! 

I usually go through albums & stockbooks when I think of it. They are staring me in the face, but... That's why it took me so long to find the Bileski Pembina-Winnipeg courier stamps! And along with that, a few Caricature definitive varieties and precancel warning strips of 20.

I should go through them more often, just to look for ideal cancels for the "postmark of the day" thread we have here. I missed a bunch this month by not checking the stockbook where I have saved these used stamps! But there is so much else to do, I always forget! My brain is an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" type!

Sheesh!