Proud Daddy Of A Brand New Stamp Collector

I am so proud! The other day my 4 yo son decided that he liked watching me sort stamps and wanted to start collecting on his own. Thanks to a fairly decent find on Craigslist he emptied out his piggy bank and we purchased two stamp albums for $9.

The good news is there are several hundreds of stamps here. Tons of WW stamps from Chech, India, Germany, Canada, Australia, Hungry Netherlands and some places I've never even heard of.

Not to mention some pretty good US stamps as well. I've seen at least two Scott #219 and #220 in good condition.

The bad news, (here's where you folks can help), is that one of the "albums" is an old picture album. The kind with the thin plastic sheet covering the page of diagonal glue lines. Is there any way we can get the stamps off with out destroying them? The other album is the Whitman Voyager stamp album. It has some spots filled in but it only goes up to 1965. A great starter for a kid, I think anyway.

We have decided that as soon as the income level of the house picks up, we are going to have to get 200-300 glassine envelopes and sort them by country and start filling in more of the good album. We?

I will be hitting you folks up with questions from now till the cows come home since I have no ideas at all about the WW Stamps. Like what is an entire sheet of Ajman Airmail worth? And where is Ajman? I'll be posting pictures as well. It's really kind of exciting!

Ajman is a former Gulf Sheikhdom, now part of the State of the United Arab Emirates [UAR].

Good luck and have fun with your new project.

Londonbus1

Devlin...have loads of fun...any questions just ask, we love to help the newbees.... It makes us old farts useful

Well done, Devlin!!

Please welcome your son to the hobby on behalf of us all!!



k

Hi Devlin

It's great that your son is taking an interest in collecting. I started helping my grandfather when I was about that age. I loved sorting the pictures. And bit by bit, I really got into it, and almost 50 years later, I'm still, "into" it. hehehe!
My daughter started matching pictures when she was about 2 1/2. And she's still into it as well.

Anyhow, with those sticky photo album pages, I found that sometimes the stamps will come off without any damage, if you stick the point of a straight pin under the edge so you can just get a corner or a bit of it unstuck, and then carefully peel up on the stamp while you hold the page down. Might have to soak the stamps afterwards and put them on paper and weight them down to get the curl out of them from peeling them off. Not always though.
Of course it also depends on how long they have been stuck to the pages.

I've never tried just soaking the whole page face down. Not sure if that would work, but it might be worth a try. Probably would have to rinse the stamps a couple of times after that to get the glue residue off of them. The stuff that just washed off the pages themselves. I hope they can be saved.

I would recommend pulling the 'overleaf' off and then soaking the whole page face down in hot water. I always add a drop of "Cascade" liquid dishwashing liquid to the water to take advantage of the wetting agent to enhance the soaking effect.

CONGRATS!

Here I am with my son a year ago. He was helping sort precancels.

Thanks for the tips everyone! I'm going to try to pull some this evening.

Stamperdude, that is a very cute little man you got there. Already working the tweezers. I'll have to see if I can get my little one to sit still long enough for a picture.

Ok, so we tried gently pulling them off the pages. Met with limited success due to the fact that some of them are very very thin to begin with. I believe they were stored in the garage for quite awhile before we got them, so there was a lot of humidity which I think "cemented" them in place.

Next step was to try and soak them off the page. This worked pretty well for about 80% of them. Again, some are so very thin to start with that they all but disintegrated in the water. I think I aided to this by trying to soak a whole page. I think we will pull the page apart and cut them into smaller chunks for the next attempt. I wonder, would heat work to maybe loosen the glue on the page? Something like a hair dryer? Has anyone tried this before?


On a good note though, we've managed to pull over a hundred US and WW stamps off the pages that were coming off on their own, so the munchkin is going to start off with a pretty good set.

1 page down, 70 more to go.

Thanks for keeping us updated on the progress! I'd have to say that yes, it sounds like a garage got some of those. Some of my stamps did the same thing when I first dug out the old stamp collection out of the crawlspace about 13 years ago I think. Just try to experiment with various methods with the stamps you can stand the "least" to lose...

Some people say that freezing stuck stamps helps to separate them. I tried it without success on full gum stuck stamps. Since yours are stuck to a photo album page rather than other stamps, you might wish to try to freeze a small section to see what happens.

quignt

It's great that you're son want's to collect with you devlin and even better that you are willing to put the time into helping do so.
My kids and I use to love doing things together when they were little.

Hope you have great succecss getting lots of the stamps out of the album succesfully.

When I first started sorting stamps I used plain white envelopes to separate them by country. You can can a box of 100 at the dollar store. I then place in order by country by country in photo boxes.

Dianne

Quigngt,
Thanks for the tip. I haven't tried freezing them so that'll be a first for me. We'll give it a shot and see what happens.

Dianne,
We are having a really good time with these. He's too funny though. Every time I pull a really nice stamp and say so, he will remind me, "Those are my stamps dad."

So far so good. I've managed to pull about 90% from the first dozen pages or so, with very few being damaged. I'm finding that the ones I have the most trouble with are the US and the Czech. Which is a shame because the Czech Coat of Arms stamps are very nice looking!

I've filled up three large letter envelopes with WW stamps and one with US so far. Still have 2/3 of the album to go through. This is fun!

Hi Devlin....

I'm also glad to see that your son enjoys the "pretty pictures"......it's enough to keep him interested in what you're doing. With any luck it will become something he enjoys for many years.


I'd be very careful about where you place some of the stamps from the old photo album.....often some of the gum with stick to the stamp and become impossibly stuck when it's placed on an album page......even if it dosen't seem like there's anything on the back of a stamp, it can still have some of that really sticky gum. To get your son started it's not a huge issue but for your own collection, I would not want anything from an old photo album in with my better items. Some photo albums aren't too but but some used a gum that will soak right though a stamp or album page.

Tried to get my three daughters into stamps, but did not last. Now I am a new grandaddy and my hopes are with my grand daughter.

Nr-notrare,

Thanks for the warning. Yes there are many that are coming off with diagonal lines of old glue on the backs. I was wondering if soaking them after I pull them off would remove that or not.

Had no luck at all with freezing them but I tried it none the less.

I have come across a page that had several stamps that appear to be molding. So far there is just this one page so I'm not pulling anymore from it or mixing them with anything else. Did I read on here somewhere that a very diluted solution of bleach water and a Q-tip might clear this up? Any one have any suggestions?