Greetings From Upstate NY

Hello,

I drifted back to stamps last December after a 38 year nap. I have decided to collect colonial African stamps this year. I selected Belgian Congo, Bechuanaland, French West Africa and its pre-cursors and Cameroun. After combing through my teen age collection, ebay, local stamp show, and stamp2go I have merrily acquired 75% of my target. Loads of fun hunting them down. I thought I was being careful, but I seem to have also acquired 40% dups as well. Currently storing collection in stock books, vario sheets for dups and Google sheets to track the growing collection.

After reading loads of info about albums, I think I'm going to try DIY. Scribus and its ability to use Python scripts looks interesting. I will use sheet protectors with two pages in each, I'm trying samples now to decide between mounts or hinges.

Thanks for this site, it's now part of my evening must read list.

Happy stamps,
Tom Grant

Welcome EastRiver. Lot of info and stuff here to help you out.

Why colonial African stamps? Belgian, British, French and German dependencies... looks like an interesting focus.

Hi oldguy,

My future daughter in law is crazy about Africa. I decided to make her a small picture framed collection of African stamps as gift, and browsing my old collection ignited my interest. I chose the colonials based on looks. I picked the countries out of a virtual hat with a random option in a spreadsheet. My plan is each year to pluck a few more from the virtual hat.

It has been interesting learning geography and history of these faraway places. A messy dark history in most cases, but still interesting. Places like Cameroun starting German, WW1 occupied by Britain and France, into a French Protectorate, WW2 into Vichy, and then rolled into French West Africa. A busy 63 years, all documented with a trail of stamps.
Tom

Welcome aboard Tom!

I am quite new to this forum as well, and also returned to collecting after a 20 year or so break. I too really like the colonial African era stamps and had thoughts of specializing there, but ultimately decided to remain a worldwide collector, but limit it to the classic era (1840-1940). I think DIY albums are probably the way to go for a specialized collection. I played around with Steiner page and figured out an easy way to convert them to Powerpoint so I can easily change the fonts, remove or move around the stamp boxes, etc. However, this was just too much work and took up too much space for a WW collection (something like 6500 pages just for the classic era stamps!), so I ultimately decided to go with the Scott Vintage Reproduction Brown albums.

Anyway, good luck with your collection.
Chris

Hi Chris,
A WW Classic is an excellent quest. I read about a guy collecting his WW birth year, I am toying with that idea to slake my thirst for NEW. I like getting the old Albulm pages when I buy stamps. I have them all filed away, to use as role models for my DIY. Enjoy your Browns.
Tom