I have been a philatelist [1] since my pre-teens. My interest is in stamps of the world, although I've acquired covers, plate blocks, mint sheets, and various and sundry other philatelic "stuff" that postal authorities generate to acquire the income of the young collector. I have been a member of the American Philatelic Society (APS) since 1995. I subscribe to the APS Code of Ethics in all my dealings.
I collect postage stamps from around the world, used and unused. Aside from the traditional low-cost sources of philatelic material: saving envelopes (and encouraging family, friends, co-workers, and perfect strangers to save them for me), purchasing at face value from postal authorities, and exchanging with other collectors, I also occasionally purchase material to augment my collection. Sometimes I will buy entire worldwide collections that I see for sale, sometimes I'll buy packets with specific items, sometimes I'll purchase kiloware or bulk lots. By far my greatest expenditures have been in supplies to assemble and maintain my collection.
Currently, I am in "catch-up" mode ... and I am trying very hard to maintain within a discipline: I'm not purchasing any new material for my collection until I have sorted and arranged all the existing material that I have. I have accumulated approximately 3 cubic feet (about .085 cubic meters) of material that needs to be sorted ... it's going to be a while before I buy anything!
At present (Winter 2007-2008), I am too busy to swap stamps. This will change at some date in the future (probably years). However, if you are looking to correspond with a philatelist in the U.S.A., drop me a line.
My collection of general worldwide postage stamps is still my favorite, even if such a collection is not considered highly sophisticated by advanced collector standards. I store this collection in an album that began life in 1979 as the 2-Volume Standard stamp album, published and manufactured by H.E. Harris & Co.. At the time, that was the biggest worldwide stamp album with the most spaces and pictures that I knew about (or could afford). With the addition of annual supplements, glassine interleaves, blank pages, and my own hand-made pages to cover issues that are not pictured, it has expanded to 10 3½ inch volumes and 5 2½ inch volumes ... and growing.
In hindsight, the old Scott International album would probably would probably be the best for completeness of spaces available. However, I don't think to spend approx. US $1000 for new pages and binders. I also don't want to spend the the time, and suffer the inevitable collateral damage involved in unmounting and remounting the collection.
In 1989, I started a specialized topical collection of stamps concerned with Peace and Human Rights. In 1995 and 1996 I went through the 1994 Scott Catalogues, page by page, and created a list of all stamp issues that were related to those topics. This became my want list / database of issues in the topic. There are approximately 2800 items in this list right now. Perhaps I need to specialize within my specialized collection?
There are several sub-topics in the Peace and Human Rights Topic:
| 1. | A person who collects and studies postage stamps, postmarks, and related materials; a stamp collector. |
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This page was last modified on Monday, 03-Dec-2007 12:54:24 EST.
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