What Stamp Got You Started In Collecting?

Is there a stamp that got you interested to start collecting? For me it was the US C11 Airmail Beacon stamp bi-color. I found this in a box of loose stamps and was hooked!

I would have to go back 60 years for that memory! But I do remember how much I liked the Kenya wildlife stamps - and still do though I don't collect them.

Same first part of the answer, although my stamps were the first issues of the Netherlands!

Peter

Seeing early mint United States stamps mounted in Scott The National Postage Stamp Album.

Back in early 1950s when I lived in Japan, I was buying some candies in a tiny store, I saw there were stamps in small glassine envelopes pasted on a large card board on the wall. I couldn't take my eyes off this very beautiful woman on a stamp. I bought it. It was a stamp from Argentina with Eva Peron on it. I still have that stamp today, though I already sold my wonderful Argentina collection to Brian Moorhouse many years ago.

Well, the first stamps I remember when I got my brother's collection was an entire coffee can full of those purple 3 cent statue of liberty stamps from the 50's. Not a classic beauty. I learned how to soak stamps and how to identify varieties. I don't know why he saved so many of that particular stamp, but it kept me occupied as a seven year old.

The Iwo Jima stamp that my dad got for me as a result of his time in the war.
Tom

Back when I was in 6th grade, my father gave me his old stamp album from when he was kid. I was fascinated by the pre-WWII European stamps that he had, and his album became the beginning of my collection.

Today I still think that pre-WWII stamps are so histoical and have great character.

When I was 7 years of age, a young lady whose father owned the family grocery store at the end of our street gave me a US Scott #958 (Swedish Pioneer Centennial). I found it interesting because most stamps seemed to be only 3-cents while this one was 5-cents. This was my first stamp. But it was Scott #397 (1-cent Balboa) that I discovered a couple of years later on an old abandoned postcard that really stoked my interest in stamp collecting.

I was just a kid and my brother, 6years older than me, had a collection of NZ stamps. Being interested in aircraft, I was taken with the first NZ air mail stamps. Interestingly, I have just recently purchased the full set of these in mint. I am delighted to have them as part of my collection.

For me it was Pan-American Exposition issues (#294-299). I seen them at an old flea market and knew my Grandfather collected stamps so I bought them and gave them t ohim. When I seen the smile on his face and his eagerness to show me his collection it was both how we bonded and how I was immediately transfixed to those album pages!

The earliest one I can recall seeing in the wild was this one:



Since I was nuts about the Gemini and Apollo programs, the 6c moon stamp also caught my attention. I was hooked from that point.

Wish I could remember a specific stamp but my earliest memory of the hobby was sitting on the floor in my brother's bedroom and we were opening those old cloth bags full of mixed on paper world stamps. It wasn't until later that we got the same sized bags of just US stamps. Those were my favorites

My first stamps were in a Nicklin "Junior International" album (copyright 1939) that was given to me by our neighbors much older daughter... I was about 8. My father, being Swedish, gave me a large envelope of used 1880-1930's mixed Scandinavian stamps that he had been carrying around for a few decades.

For me, it was the Amateur Radio stamp of 1964 (Sc. 1260). A few years later, I even annotated my album as per photo below. I was a coin collector first, but for some reason I switched to stamps. No regrets and have moved on from U.S. commemoratives to W/W.

Don

Hard to nail down the exact stamp that got me interested, but there is one stamp that cemented my obsession with classis US and (more specifically) the 1869 pictorials.

US 114

When I saw this stamp at ~ 11 years old, I knew I had to have one. One turned into many. Many turned into an obsession.

Here are a couple recent acquisitions ...

Brian