Mistakes From My Earliest Days Of Collecting

When I was about 12 years old, I found a letter at my grandmother's house that came from Bolivia. I asked her about it and learned we had distant cousins that were missionaries there. I asked her if she had any more and she gave me several. In no time I had them cut out and stored in an envelope. We had just moved the week or so before. I told mom one day I'd like to have a stamp album for my treasures, and she told me there was a stamp album in the laundry room cabinets that was found there when we moved in! I raced to retrieve it! Oh, the beautiful stamps with their strange exotic names...Eire, Magyar, Suomi..thus began a long love affair with pretty little pieces of paper (philately for the purists).

One of the first containers I move my stamps to until I had time to sort and soak and mount (more on that later) them was an old Faberge Soap-on-a-Rope box. To this day that smell evokes EXTREMELY fond days of sitting at home during the raging winter reading and soaking up all I could about stamps.

As for the mounting, I had never heard of hinges or mounts, and the stamps sure couldn't be re-licked, so I did what any genius 12-year old kid would do...Scotch tape! I still have several stamps left with old brown tape residue on them from my early days, and tho they are purely "worthless" they are still some of my treasured stamp collection.

What were YOUR early goofball mistakes (if you are man or woman enough to admit it in public! LOL)

I can't top scotch tape!

I had a wonderful used US collection from the 20's to the 80's that I put together stamp by stamp as a teenager, then I caught the mint bug and replaced most of them with mint stamps, then years later I got rid of the mint stamps and went back to used!

I was about 8 years old and I remember getting a Xmas stamp (1964 Australian) on an envelope and I noticed that it was different. I thought that the stamp was faulty and threw it away. I realised later that it was probably an example that was missing a colour, probably "red". That's how my mind remembers it, anyway. I need to learn how to insert a "Sad Face".
Stephen

I was about 14 and a friend of mine wanted to show me her stamp collection. I think her grandfather has just given it to her. Believe it or not a whole bunch of us kids in the neighborhood collected stamps. I even remember having a "stamp bourse" on my front porch. Anyway she took out a mint RW1 US duck stamp and had it in her palm. She raised cocketeils and one of them must have thought the stamp was food because he hopped down and grabbed the stamp with his beak, putting a nice big hole in the center of it!

I was probably 9 or 10. Instead of scotch tape, I used the old gummed hole reinforcers for notebook paper. I folded them in half and used them like hinges (which I hadn't heard of at that point). It never occurred to me that someday I might want to remove and remount those stamps!

lkkoller gives good post bait.

My older brother (z"l) saved me from the Scotch Tape Error by 1) pasting stamps into his album (a tallish, 1" thick, green, bound volume) (which has since, sadly, disappeared) and, then, 2) learning that you're not supposed to paste the stamps into the album, and, then, 3) passing me the heads up.

I blame our mother (aren't mothers to blame for everything?) because one of our Mother's Little Helper jobs was to lick'n'stick a steady stream of Plaid Stamps and S&H Green Stamps into *their** little albums, so how was my brother to know any better?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

ikey:

I also remember those S&H Green Stamps -- there's a thread on here about them. Fond memories...

I used to dry stamps between paper towels under a weight. Unfortunately, the paper towels did not have a smooth surface, but had a repeating embossed pattern, which transferred to the stamps. Occasionally, I will find one of these embossed stamps still hiding in my duplicates.

Robert

I think my biggest mistake was spending $100 on 10,000 cheap stamps instead of on one good stamp The cheap stamps are still worthless, but the $100 stamp would still be a star in my collection.

As someone who buys collections from time to time I can assure all that the practice of gluing stamps into an album or loose leaf book of some sort was (and maybe still remains) very common. And I have seen some really nice stuff stuck to paper - and had the unenviable task of informing the expectant owner that they were worthless. My personal mistake - from when I was a teen - was when I gathered up my plate block collection into a box and took it in to an insurance agent to see what insurance would cost. I found out it cost more than I figured the stamps were worth. Disheartened, I visited a neighbourhood soda fountain and had a coke to wash down my sorrows. I then walked out and left the box on the table. It was a crushing blow at the time but probably the loss would not come close to $100.

My personal mistake as a kid was in buying those "economically priced" (i.e. "cheap" -- even though they didn't seem cheap on a kid's allowance) Crystal Stamp Mounts manufactured by the old HE Harris & Co., only to find them shrinking, yellowing, and damaging both my stamps and my album pages.

Fortunately, nothing of any great value was lost, but as a kid you focus on spending your limited money on stamps rather than proper storage solutions for them. Live and learn.

The last time I did this (spoiler alert: here comes the reason it was the last time) the stamps vacuum-welded to the paper towel.

I used to think that vacuum welding was something that only NASA et al had to worry about and, in fact, it *was* a serious problem to be overcome in the design of the docking collars for the Apollo program et al.

But those stamps will *not* leave that paper towel. Forget re-soaking; that only serves to remind you that paper towels are good at drying-out after they get wet. And forget peeling-while-wet; I got the paper towel equivalent of hinge remains when I did not finger-shred the stamp.

In my case, I think it was the *lack* of embossing that was the cause of the vacuum-welding (still don't know what else to call it); I was in a new country, and trying to show the kids how it was done, and the paper products were, like every other place on Earth, a cut below what I was accustomed to.

I suspect that the smoother surface was to blame because the same thing happened with office paper. Duh.

Of course, in those days, there was fresh experimental fodder arriving most every day in the form of m-a-i-l ...

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

HEY! WATCH OUT! I STILL DO THIS!

It seems to me that something this universal stops being a mistake, and just becomes another yellow brick on the Yellow Brick Road.

But, if that doesn't work for you ...

What say we take a vote, and absolve Jenny2U, so she can put this painful episode behind her, and move on?

Or, does she need to go into rehab, learn to own her packet problem ...

Hmm ... my jargon button is stuck on autopilot.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I had help with my major philatelic blunder. Along about 1956, there must have been some sort of program to intrest school children in stamp collecting, because my older sister started collecting about the same time as I did, and she lived with my grandparents. When christmas breck finally came, we traveled the two hours back up the Coast to Manchester where the family ranch was. On the ranch was my grandfather's Aunt Fay's house, which was begining to be unsafe and was used just for storage. Upstairs in the old house were two steamer trunks, and the top trays of those two trunks were stuffed full of old letters. Grandma said we could have any of the stamps we wanted. You can guess whats comming next, right? This ranch had been in the family since 1877, and the old house was the original structure, I have no idea what sort of covers my oldest and youngest sisters and I tore stamps from, just that we had a lot of banknote stamps, all mostly low values. I still have a Sc 136 from that raid. I would rather have the cover it came off of, even without the stamp.

I think this can be a matter of personal preference. Sure, the $100 stamp would have a better "value" but are you collecting stamps for investment and future sale? Or are you collecting stamps for the mere enjoyment of it, without much regard for value?

As a kid, I would much rather have 1000 or 10,000 stamps to go through for hours of entertainment, rather than one expensive stamp I would look at for a short time and relegate it to an album page only to be opened on special occasions.

The things I learned going through the thousands of "cheap" stamps helped in my learning geography and finding out about people, places and things depicted on the stamps, as well as the different printing methods and so forth.

One good stamp may be more valuable come selling time but the education and learning experience and hours of enjoyment studying the cheaper stamps have a value, too -- even if it's not monetary.

>>>>>>>I think this can be a matter of personal preference. Sure, the $100 stamp would have a better "value" but are you collecting stamps for investment and future sale? Or are you collecting stamps for the mere enjoyment of it, without much regard for value?

I agree totally with this - and would sugegst collectors have two collections: one for fun, and one for investment.