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