How Much Have You Completed For A Country Collection?

It all rather depends on what you collect, and how you collect it. For example, this



is the complete country of Jhalawar, on a simplified basis. If you want to get technical, the specialists recognise a blue-green shade of the first stamp:



Two or three stamps, catalogue values (Gibbons 2013 Part 1) £6.50 simplified, or £176.50 specialised.

Of course, you can then go on from there, to sheets, covers, postmarks and so on.

Like a trip around the world in a different direction every second week, with free history lessons thrown in.!

Given that the perfection is completeness, & that satisfaction comes from getting ever and ever closer to this nirvana state by filling empty spaces, how much does knowing that a collection cannot realistically be complete affect the fun in the hobby?

I would believe that having an achievable completedness goal (defined by the collector him/herself) would be like fun x2 throughout the long collecting journey ~

ricecooker - what do you do when you achieve completeness? Sell? Or move on to another collecting area? I find having a couple of dozen incomplete countries keeps my interest level high. I have lots to look for and, even when I find a missing piece, the interest level is undiminished. I collected only New Zealand a few years ago and, since I didn't want to specialize in particular issues of that country (say for example reconstructing plates of the ads-on-back issues), I was losing interest because I couldn't find affordable new items to add. I still don't spend much time in my NZ albums but my interest level in the hobby is higher than ever.

I have US almost full run from about 1919 through 2002. Also collect Germany- it is impossible to complete that area it's too vast but you can complete in stages and I have for example nearly all DDR (E German) issues except for a few of the expensive officials, West Germany full run from 1949 to 1999 except for the post horn set (I do have it used, rest are mint) and pretty much all the Reich issues from 1872 to 1946 except for about a half dozen (and if you know Germany you can guess what those are).

Lots of them, as with Tony's example, (although there aren't many countries with only one stamp) there are many smaller countries that are "completable". Such as Allenstein:

Michael