Pushing 330,000 All Different Worldwide Stamps In One Collection .

I'm sure nearly all of us began as kids with "stamps by the bag" or envelopes with stamps in them. I used to visit my local "five and dime" store which had some racks of stamp lots for sale.

Or you could send away for them and taping a dime or a quarter to a piece of cardboard would get you a bunch of stamps in return. Plus there were "approvals" where a dealer would send you a few dozen sets of stamps, each in a separate glassine envelope, for you to choose which to buy.

After a few years of this, though, you began to realize how many times you'd seen many of the same stamps.

What most collectors do at this point is to move up the next step to larger lots and larger envelopes of stamps. That's followed by buying complete sets of stamps by mail or at dealers or stamp shows. And that's followed by buying cheaper entire collections of one country or the world and taking out what you need. We've all probably done this, the progression coming faster or slower with different people.

The problem with buying affordable stamp collections is that if you keep buying modestly priced collections of the world or separate countries, you discover that most collector have the same stamps -- the ones easy to get. You learn later that the best approach is to really stretch to buy the very best collections you can afford since they will have less common stamps and entire sets which the less expensive repetitive ones do not have. If this comes when you are young, and can afford to do this, good for you. For most of us, though, it comes after raising kids and so on, later in life.

Another realization is that in "worldwide" collections, each country is almost always incomplete by many stamps. Only specific country collections are likely to have any degree of completeness and avoid all those empty spaces and frustrating incomplete sets. This problem was also aided by a few stamp agencies in certain countries omitting the top value or two from used sets ordered from them, so as to make you pay more for it later I suppose. You'd get eight or nine out of ten stamps in a set, but not the most expensive value(s). Plus high value stamps, in general, always cost more so of course they are often missing from collections. This has been true since the beginning of collecting.

Another tangent you might go off on is buying year sets from the nations that issue them, putting a lot of your money into recent modern stamps instead of into older, more classic stamps before they rise too much in price to ever afford. I did this. Modern stamps look nice in an album, but they hardly ever rise much in value and can often still be bought inexpensively many years later. It's also better to get copies of classic stamps to fill those spaces. Save buying modern stamps until later. The vast majority of modern stamps can be purchased cheaply years after they were issued, so there's no rush.

In my late teens, frustrated that I could never afford more expensive stamps, I subscribed to a dealer in "seconds" who sold good-looking but slightly damaged stamps -- a pinhole, a tiny tear, a smudge -- pretty cheaply. Years later, you will regret doing this.

And finally by the time you can afford to buy entire collections of most countries or the hard-to-find stamps you've always wanted, you're wondering if, maybe, you're so old you should start selling off your collections anyway. Irony of ironies.