Why Do You Collect What You Collect?

I must also have the collector gene. Over the years, I have collected stamps, coins, comic books, baseball cards, vintage GI Joes, antique fishing lures, military and history books, items related to Elvis, classic movies on DVD, factory sales literature of classic and exotic cars, antique hand tools, Rhodesian military items, and firearms. With the exception of baseball cards, stamps were my earliest collecting interest. I developed quite substantial collections of a number of these but most have long since been sold off. The only ones I still have are the stamps, classic movies on DVD, military and history books, and Rhodesian military items. Right now I'm in the process of thinning out my books on eBay because I have thousands of volumes and would like to get it down to a more manageable 200-300 of the ones that appeal to me most.

I Can't remember exactly how old I was (10 or 12) when I started my collection but I remember getting a nice album for $5.00. I would order stamps from the back of magazines for a dollar and sometimes would find some at Woolworths. I collected world wide to my late teens when I joined the military and then stashed it away for a while.

3 or 4 years later I met a young boy who was house bound with an illness and gave hime the collection.

Fast foward 25 years I was tutering a young girl who wanted to start a collection and while helping her I was hooked again. 16 Years later I have a world wide collection that is spread over 2 rooms in the house

I think the main reason I stick with world wide is that I love learning about the history of each county and particularly the ones that no longer exist.

Dianne

I'm very pleased this topic has inspired so many responses, and they're not all exclusively stamp collectors. I like that, I collect a few other things as well: sterling silver bookmarks, antique pens and pre-publication review copies of books. Now I'll say a few words about one of my other areas of interest in stamps: Great Britain. I collect GB mainly because I was born there, and even though I've lived in the US for about 80% of my life, I still maintain strong ties to the UK, I go back there on average once every three years for a visit and enjoy most things British: TV, movies, food, books. I began collecting at a very early age, while I was still living there, and because everyone wrote letters and used stamps back then (early 1950's) the first ones in my collection were probably British definitives. Even so, I collected worldwide, and didn't concentrate on GB, just added sporadically over the years with many years in which I did nothing at all. In 2000 a national stamp show came to the Anaheim Convention Center, which had a GB post office, so I bought all of the Millennium issues that they had on sale, and signed up with the Royal Mail new issue service, and kept that up for about two years , but once again put my collecting on hold. Then, about 5 years ago my mother passed away and left me some money. I didn't know what to do with it at first, but just put it in the bank, and not long after I came across a fantastic GB collection on eBay. It was housed in 5 beautiful hingeless Schaubek albums and was about 85% complete of everything from 1840 to 2013. So I bought it and have been attempting to fill in all the gaps. I'm getting there, with only a handful of the very rarest ones that I'm sure I'll never be able to own. I order the new issues from WOPA in Gibraltar, and have to buy the album supplements from the publishers. I've acquired a lot of "extras" along the way: the four Mulready varieties, pre-stamp covers, bisects, telegraph stamps and a few other things that the album pages don't provide pace for

Thanks for sharing, waddsbadds. Nice story. Wondering if you obtained the 5 pound yellow Queen Victoria stamp. When I was actively collecting GB; not now, but still have the collection; I coveted that and the Postal Union King George V stamp. The Queen was way beyond my budget.

The £5 QV with specimen overprint is the cheapest way to fill that gap.

Why do I collect what I do? Because it is there.

I lived in France for a year as a kid, and that is where I started, so France is the core of my collection. But now that I have gotten all the low-hanging fruit, I am moving on to the colonies, and across the Rhine to Germany.

German and Austrian stamps reflect their complicated histories, so I have gotten bogged down there.

In grad school, I did some work on Moroccan history and on French colonialism, so have gotten into Moroccan locals and into West African postal history.

To Climber Steve: yes, I do have the 5 pound Queen Victoria stamp (actually orange, not yellow) and to Bobby De La Rue, yes the specimen overprint is the cheapest way to obtain this stamp. I got mine a few months ago at what I consider to be a fantastic price, and despite the Specimen overprint is still a very attractive stamp and fills a gap in my collection which would scream at me every time I opened the album to that page. Also to Climber Steve, yes I also have the KGV one pound PUC stamp, that came up for sale at a very attractive price. I also have the Queen Victoria 5 pound telegraph stamp which is almost identical except it says Telegraphs on it instead of Postage and has a different watermark. This one came first and is supposedly the scarcer of the two.

After working my way through world, then mostly USA, then realizing that a 'complete' topical collection was going to be more reasonable, I wandered into waterfalls as I have always enjoyed watching the real thing.

I spent several years pouring over catalogues with a magnifying glass looking at the images to see if there was anything resembling water running downhill pictured to make a checklist. About the time I thought it was in pretty good shape, an ATA group started assembling one — whereby several I had missed got added to my list. It was really fun working with folks who were just as fascinated with waterfalls as I.

B.G.

I collect all-world, used stamps only.
I'm interested in most things, and most of the world.
I think I'll eventually start a thematic collection, but there's no rush.

I started collecting worldwide as a kid, progressed to specializing in US, going the MNH route, and had everything from the Washington Franklins to 1980 MNH, except the Zep's and the White Plains sheet, then going back to 1847 everything was used. I lost interest in collecting and sold it all around 1995. Then regained interest in collecting again around 2000, US again but all postally used, and WW to 1930. My main interest is workhorse stamps that were created to actually move the mail, such as US # 720 of which I have a robust collection of shades, cancels, EFO's, and plate flaws, all of which I find fascinating. The WW to 1930 with an emphasis on SON canceled stamps is also a fun pursuit. I also collect several more modern world issues that are philatelically complex, and originally created to move mail. I now avoid any expensive stamps opting to fill those album spaces with more common stamps with nice cancels. This makes for a fun pursuit for me, and requires little expenditure of money, as I mount everything with hinges, make any album pages I want by hand, trade stamps and buy them by the pound. Collectors and non collectors both find my collection very interesting, and I enjoy collecting in this fashion, finding it very satisfying in every respect.

I focus on Bosnia Herzegovina because it is such a complicated part of the world, the stamps and the research that went with them clarified many things. This led to Austria-Hungary, and its role in the Balkans. Add in then Bulgaria, Romania, Danube and Black Sea Railway (RR another focus), to say nothing of S.O.N cancels that, especially in Austria Hungary, are a geography lesson in themselves as to the various AH offices abroad. Overall has helped me make sense, somewhat, of a complicated historical record that current press.