Are Stamp Collectors Hoarders?

It sound as really good definition. But, what if someone is collecting the hoard of the same material in books and/or envelopes?
I think that we all are a bit crazy. Why would someone collect postage stamps when there are so many better and more native things to use Your time for?

I think that the hoarder/collector definition is a good one.

A hoarder is my friend Darrell who has over 400 sewing machines in his house. He has no idea what he has and I guess he just likes to sit and look at them. What a mess his son will have when that house has to be cleaned out. He also has several hundred manual typewriters.
Tom

The Single Phone Call Solution would be to a scrap metal dealer.

It'd be nice to recover some value, but a dozen cats would be more trouble.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I"m reading this and cant believe

I'll flip that one on its head: Why do anything else when one can spend their time collecting stamps?

Because many other things are more native, common and in modern human nature:) Why I wrote "modern"? Because don"t know if collecting have something in relationship with early man.
Or You wanna say that we, stamps collectors are more normal than other 99,9% of the Earth"s population?

It would be interesting to hear the opinion of a psychiatrist about this topic.

I don't think stamp collectors are any more or less "normal" than anyone else. Stamp collecting is a diversion, no more or less useful than most other hobbies. Some like to read, play golf, hunt or fish, or just plain sit and watch TV. There's nothing inherently unusual about collecting bits of paper. Collecting things of one sort or another has been documented for centuries, if not millennia.

Why do You think that reading can be compared to collecting used papers?
Collecting and completing sets have as their archetypal antecedents the collecting of "nuts and berries" once needed for survival by our early ancestors.
Muensterberger, in his perspective paper "Unruly Passion" believes collecting to be a "need-driven compensatory behavior where every new object effectively gives the notion of fantasized omnipotence

We all are a bit crazy, deal with that.

The Satin Bowerbird, from eastern Australia, collects blue things (bottle tops, pens, straws, cigarette lighter, etc) to make his bower pretty for the ladies. It's not just us humans.

If a collector has a system to organize his or her collection then I would not say that collector is a hoarder, even if they do develop a large backlog of unorganized material "to be worked on later". Hoarders, to me, don't have any "system" to organizing what they horde, it just ends up wherever it does and eventually becomes lost in the clutter.

In one Seinfeld episode, Jerry is attempting to ascertain if George has a girlfriend...which George denies. He asks George, "are there any feminine products in your bathroom?"

Concerning stamp collectors/hoarders I would ask, "Are there any bags of stamps, or boxes of covers in a closet in your home?" Or, "Are glassine envelopes lying on any flat surface in your study?"

Depends on whether they have far more naterial than they will ever get to and continue to add to it.

As I see it, the difference between a "stamp collector" and a "hoarder" is the spelling. I am a stamp collector, have many, many, many pounds of extra stuff I never look at, and "collect" piles of other stuff in the name of collecting! The "title" is only important to the news media when they find your body in the pile of stuff. :-)

Why ruin the fun?

Unlike drugs, we're not even hurting ourselves.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

And, as all good New Yorkers know, this is how it ends -

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york...ry-1.1187698