New Member

Hello, my name is Adam and I'm from Poland. A few years ago, out of curiosity, and with free means, I took the opportunity and acquired a large collection of stamp albums. I'm currently trying to personally identify them and learn their history, however, not being a specialist in philately and not having one among friends and family, I have a big problem. This has been quite a long time, but I did not give up and I'm still looking for information inter alia on philatelic forums. On the basis of current knowledge, it seems to me that I have in my collection some really interesting items. I would be very grateful for the help of experienced philatelists in identifying my collection at times. I must admit that I'm willing to sell interesting, unique or valuable stamps, if I can just find them in my albums. Greetings to all members!

Welcome to SCF, Adam. No one ever started out as an expert but everyone who is one became one by taking one step at a time. Basic guides to stamp collecting are readily available, for instance at the American Pilatelic Society (www.stamps.org)--use their search box and type in "beginners guides" and click the most promising of the results. Surely there is a Polish Philatelic Society under some name or another and it may have similar guides for beginners on its webpage.

Perhaps you can locate a stamp club in your city. You can learn a lot via the internet but it always helps to have a real person to turn to as well.

Get access to catalogues--Michel, Stanley Gibbons, Scott, Yvert, . . . . pretty much publish catalogues for most countries in the world. If you can use copies in libraries or from a stamp club member you can avoid spending money on them until you know better what you need most. Specialized catalogues exist for individual countries, including Poland, of course, but that level of detail is probably best left for later. There's an online identifying system at www. stampworld.com, but it uses its own numbering system that won't correspond to Michel or Stanley Gibbons or Scott.

Just dig in. People here can help you with specific questions or puzzles if you post quality scans in the sections of the forum that most closely fit the topic. Scans are much, much better than even the best photographs and many photographs posted are simply of next to no use but if you have no scanner, then make sure that the stamp fills the photograph, is sharp, and is taken from straight above, not on an angle (difficult to achieve).

People here are glad to help but nothing can substitute for your effort to master the learning curve.

If you have specific questions right now, just post away.

@Hieronymus
In my free time I'm trying to learn a lot. I learned the basics from Polish books, because I'm not expert in English and reading English books is a little bit challenge for me. For now I use Fischers catalog of Polish stamps and Michels Deutschland stamps catalog - I have mostly German and Polish stamps. Thank you for the links :).

GreenBottle welcome to SCF hope you enjoy your stay here with us. I am looking forward to hearing from you.