Mistakes From My Earliest Days Of Collecting

I made a lot of mistakes as a young collector ,but the biggest was listening to older collectors at our local club . Never again did I take advice from any collectors .I got a whole list of b.$. advice that was grossly wrong .

My very first attempt at stamp collecting was my first submission to my Boy Scout troop leader. I handed him a few pages of what were stamps glued to pieces of black construction paper. Embarrassment ensued. I was told, among all of the strange looks that I was getting, that they needed to be on "hinges". I said "what's a hinge?".

Our next meeting went much better.

...Anyway, I got my Merit Badge...


-IBFS

I am guilty of the same thing, tape used as a hinge on the back of stamps. Seems many of us learned the hard way. Glad I didn't have anything of real value back then.

Hi IndianGoldEagle - here's yet another benefit of philately that we never really think about. It taught us to be careful of valuable (mainly to us) things.

How about not buying a perfectly centered mint unhinged block of 4 of the Bluenose offered to me for $40?

My biggest regret was when I was in my 20s, I went through my childhood albums, and the albums my grandfather gave me from his collection, and down-sized by discarding all the large modern pictorials, which I regarded as worthless. Now I quite miss them - Umm Al Quaiwain (I think) Disappearing Animals, Yemen space stamps, Ajman Kennedy stamps and so on. I'd quite like to still have some of them.

These are some awesome stories! After the bird punching stamp fiasco and all the other storie of tape and glue I don't feel quite so bad any more. Thanks guys! :-)

I started collecting at seven and a lot of my early collection had been my older brothers. I made three big mistakes that I think back on. The first is I tore so many thousands of stamps off covers and documents and soaked them. My uncle was the county auditor and he always gave me very cool revenue documents that I soaked the stamps from. As a cover collector the thought of this makes me wish I had a time machine.
My second mistake is what I threw out. In my brothers collection there was a large coffee can full of flying eagle meter tapes. I have no idea how many there were, but as a kid I saw no value in meters and I did not know the difference between flying eagles and flying monkeys.
The third thing I did was let me mother influence me to stop collecting used worldwide and shift over to mint US. That was going to be my vast fortune. I never saw stamps as an investment and my vast fortune is now being used for postage.

The guys at the stamp club were all from Europe and told me that collecting Worldwide was a waste and I should purchase older MNH stamps of Europe stuff like Germany ,Poland ,Czech ,Belgium and Italy .I did that around 1969 and 1970 ,spending all my extra money on MNH at full price from the local dealers .Today all that same material would get me about what I paid for it .As told by the club members ,don't put that material into my albums but just keep it on dealer cards so I never enjoyed them on the album pages . What a load of bad advice .

I would have thought that the retainer gene and the purger gene are rarely active in the same organism at the same time.

Perhaps it is precisely thus: retainer + purger => 'serious' collector ?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

It was more a case of retainer gene + lack of space + keep moving house (student days) = get rid of unnecessary bulk. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I also shed stacks of Guernsey and Jersey presentation packs, all my old GB FDCs, and stacks of other things which, under different circumstances, I might still have.

Coming from a collecting family I knew hinges and showgard.What I didn't know is how limited a normal pre printed album can be.I wasted thousands of dollars on supplements only to later scrap them in favor of quadrilles.My other BIG mistake was poor tong handling destroying expensive purchase (canada F3)

I consider my biggest mistake was buying USA new issues. I now have a pile of booklets and sheetlets that I'd happily trade for one decent 10 sh/ Irish seahorse!!

Collecting First Day Covers, thinking they're really valuable, or will be valuable: just one of several mistakes I've made.
Sure, there are a few semi-valuable FDCs; but, only a few.
Only logic says a stamp cancelled on the day of issue should be worth more than one cancelled later. Logic has a habit of being wrong.
They are nice to look at, though.

There certainly has been a sea change in the market for FDCs, but maybe this is the case where we get to give ourselves a break?

(Let's exclude 'Real FDCs' or EKUs from what follows.)

Borrowing from Prof Tuchman's rules for what qualifies as folly, was the collapse in FDCs foreseeable?

What, at their core, was fatally wrong with FDCs all along?

Was this fault openly discussed at the time?

I remember much (ultimately futile) wailing against the Original Gum Tyranny fifty years ago.

And, I remember a widespread (and ever-spreading) disgust with CTOs.

I don't recall the same broad discussion about FDCs.

And, if there was not an open discussion of a fatal flaw underlying the FDC market, maybe we can give ourselves a break?

Rather than an underlying flaw, I think that it might be fair to say that FDCs were a victim of their own success.

The core of the hobby remains filling designated album spaces, with the principal goal being completeness. But fill with what?

The plain vanilla FDC looked pale next to the cacheted FDC and, as soon as there were more than a handful of cachet makers, completeness went flying out of the window. Limited edition hand-painted cachets - the lovely work of Mr Collins comes to mind - slammed that window shut, once & for all.

And once completion became impossible, you lost a lot of folks. Stamps were a government monopoly; cacheted FDCs were a free market, which anyone could enter at any time, making for a proliferation of FDCs akin to the proliferation of new issues.

I do not think that anyone who had been sending three pennies (okay, five pennies in my case) and an SASE to the post office could have foreseen a day when a collection of cacheted FDCs would be just like a collection of shot glasses from the gift shops of national parks: fun to buy, but you'd better enjoy them, because you'll never see that money again.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey