New Here But Not New To Collecting.

New here but not new to collecting. My father collected most of his life and he passed that affliction to me at a relatively young age. Due to his influence we have amassed a large world wide collection that takes up an entire bedroom converted to the now so called "Stamp Room" which has little room for anything but the collection and it's support system. In addition to his traditional methods of accumulating stamps and postal related items he and I began buying new world wide releases in the early seventies. We tried to be careful about not acquiring the same materials but, it wasn't always successful. There are some duplicates that I have given much thought about selling, just not yet. Now that my father has passed so has my passion for adding to the madness. I have slowed my purchasing substantially. Now only securing items I feel we missed in the heyday of acquisitions. During that time he and I began actively seeking stamps with margins attached, gutter samples, full sheets, booklets, coils and many, many souvenir sheets. If a souvenir sheet was available through our new release sources or not so new release sources every effort was made to secure them. Therefore there are allot of them. I have enough material to work on mounting for the rest of my life without being able to finish. There are many collections in the collection. Most of which I hope to meld into the "main collection" some day. I am in my early sixties now and unfortunately have been unable to instill the interest into any of my kids, but it's not over yet! My kids range from 37 down to 12. My youngest is showing interest but she is so busy with school, sports and social activities there is little time for her to "work" on anything stamp related. But she does love to sit in the evening carefully flipping through country albums picking out her favorites and she, like me, has her favorite countries. We both, independently mind you, prefer the Asian countries such as ROC, PRC, Japan, Laos just to mention a few. She is talking about certain topical interests that she would like to work on. That is a no problem for me! Like I said it's not over yet!

I don't know how much input I will have here but if the opportunity arises I will try to put in my two cents. My father was the philatelist I am the collector. As far as I can see, there is much philatelic knowledge here already that are much quicker on the scanner / keyboard than I am. In the meantime I am here reading your posts when I can.

Welcome.

You never which seeds will germinate. As you say, it's not over yet.