Mistakes From My Earliest Days Of Collecting

Biggest regret....selling my collection in my early 30s to fund my own startup business. Even that is not so much a regret, since the business did operate for over 5 years before finally closing down (opened online DJ store, by 2008 no one was buying hard copy new music and my wholesale suppliers had gone into bankruptcy, cutting off my supply. Choice was either wrap up business or increase prices by about 2x to cover cost of directly importing product from Europe. Made the sane decision to wrap up.) But by my early-30s I had a really well-developed, mostly mint WW collection strong in Europe and Middle East.

Having said that, now that I've come back to active collecting I am having a lot of fun basically starting over from scratch in those areas that I didn't inherit collections from when my father passed away, and building upon the collections which I did inherit from him (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia-Singapore).

Let's see.

As a kid someone gave me unfolded hinges. I didn't fold them before use. That may have been the largest of my transgressions.

Oddly, I feel remorse over not having my Harris Statesman album, which was my first album, given to me when I was 8 or 9.

Perplexing, while serving 4 years (88-92) in the US Coast Guard, I very actively (mostly through shows)purchased Scouts on Stamps. I very specifically remember in my Boston then-apartment, packing the stockbooks in the same box with my bed linens.

Bed linens made it to Memphis. Stockbooks did not. I checked the moving company, my roommate, everyone. Not a sign anywhere of the missing stockbooks.

Gosh that would be such a bummer to unpack and find a collection missing. I feel your pain!

"As a kid someone gave me unfolded hinges. I didn't fold them before use. That may have been the largest of my transgressions."

-- so how did you make use of them?

I suspect he used them rather like scotch tape, by licking the hinge, and applying the sticky side to the face of the stamp & the adjacent page.

Of course, my suspicion is not informed by my having done any such thing.

Ever.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Like how my letter sheet was mounted in an album I purchased a couple months ago

Stamp collecting was WELL established in my family and still is by at least 2 family members to date but I wasn't let into the "club" I guess maybe because of my rough childhood I don't know but all I can remember is getting some stuff passed down to me mainly cover and FDC & CTO's and a few banknote covers...I soaked em all! Oh man I could kick myself in the but for that but live and learn. Thankfully when I re-initiated my collecting I had started reading reference books and I had the internet handy so I guess another mistake was lack of patience to fill in the gaps in my album...Do I have a few hard to find stamps? -Yes. Are they worth anything -Probably not HOWEVER I learned to be more focused and realized through wt1's posts that a postal history collection and cancellations were what fascinated me and then the bulb went off! I miss my hometown very much so I started looking for covers from it with both the cover, Cancellation, Stamp and sometimes content. It just made sense to me. So a happy ending to a rough start up! lol

An even more recent mistake was when I re-mounted everything on quadrilles I laid out the pages for presentation not for expansion.I am now in the middle of correcting this, spreading them out enough that I can add all those fly specks me and wert seem to find.As I use cardstock minimum cost of error is 'round ten cents per page adds up quickly.Stupid Frog !