Starting Over Again ...

(Don't now how to attach one of those funny/laughing symbols) Geoff wrote: "do I really care about perf varieties of Portuguese colonies? No......" But those are a big part of what I'm about. Along with classic Portuguese colonial shades, shifted overprints or values, etc.

Guess I like the varieties over the one-space per number fans. I also like early classic Mexico, with all the district overprints.

In conclusion, I've collected continuously since age 10 1/2 in spring, 1960. I don't think I would do anything different. It's all been a "long, strange ride," as in the Grateful Dead song. And hopefully not over for a long time to come.

I'm with Blaamand--it would be France for me,too. In my judgment France's stamps do more justice to its topography and its culture than do the stamps of any other country, and they usually (although not always) do so in aesthetically appealing ways. There's been a slight fall-off in the 21st century, what with such wretched excesses as 10 stamps dedicated to "Garfield," a lame U.S. comic strip, but still the overall quality is pretty high. I collect used stamps and I especially enjoy the round cancellations on French stamps that legibly indicate the town or city of a stamp's mailing.

I'm definitely doing it, it's just going to be a slow, gradual process. Those parts of my collection on Steiner pages (about 35-40 countries) will stay there. The rest of my WW-to-date collection has been mostly housed in Lighthouse stockbooks and they'll stay there until they need to be moved. I'm in the midst of moving Portugal at the moment as I recently acquired a couple hundred or so new stamps that I don't have room for in the stockbook. I'll continue moving countries as needed until most of it is in Vario pages. Some parts of my collection, mostly "wallpaper" type issues, will likely stay in stockbooks.

@theArtfulHinger - Cool, that makes us almost in the same boat - transferring from Lighthouse stockbooks to Varios. And as you, I realize its gonna be a slow process.


Clever - I've been considering the same - why spend a Grande Classic Signum on areas like Mongolia - the albums retail value would decrease after adding my CTO / Wallpaper junk in there...then again I would like to see a uniform book shelf. Time will tell what to do

Steve

I've recently been bringing together my Portuguese Colonies stamps in one place. I was about to leave spaces for the range of varieties, then realised that I would have a lot of ... spaces. Am I going to fill these at this stage? Probably not, so I went for a simplified version - still pretty thin unfortunately. If I had your range if material, things would have been different! I do keep the perf and paper varieties where I spot them, however!

Geoff

It's not really "starting over" but one thing I have done recently is created "My Album" in which I put things that are interest to me. I use PowerPoint to create the page and Google to find details, then mount my items and surround it with the detail.

It seems to be almost more fun than trying to fill a country album, or a topical area. It is more like a stream of thought album. I don't have to consider value, centering, catalogs, mint vs used, etc. Just the item and its story.

Well, I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say. Going with Lighthouse for all binders and stockbooks is uniform enough for me, even if they're not all the same size/color.

The drawback with uniformity for me is that your albums start to resemble the contents of a lawyer's office - those endless, and extremely rarely consulted, volumes of statutes. I rather like the chaos of different styles - just as with my books. My French collection is beginning to look alarmingly uniform, however!

Geoff, I am on the fence about continuing with KGVI. I actually think I would have been happier had I gone with the Stanley Gibbons albums. I'll probably take a vacation from it for now and re-engage later.

Jack Kelley

I collected KGVI for about 25 years until I got to the point of not being able to add to the collection further. The collection was deep- for example I had all of the Bermuda keyplates by despatch, the only questionable one being SG 120 (12/6d first printing). Some stamps were simply unreachable (e.g. Grenada 1950 printing of the 2.5d, Bahamas SG 156a thin paper printing), while others listed in the Commonwealth KGVI catalog had more modest cat value but were virtually impossible to find. After hitting this wall, within a year I asked Murray Payne in the UK to auction my collection off, except for Sudan. I have a MNH collection of Sudan going back to 1898 but have only added perhaps 10 stamps in the past 6 years.

Last year, I got the bug again but decided to "start over" with different goals. I no longer accumulate whatever examples I can find for later sorting, but rather go for the main perf, shade, and paper varieties. For how I collect now, this is a much "calmer" approach and not so obsessive. Leaves me room to pursue WW definitives while gradually building KGVI.

I started over on Malaya as well, but wow the material has gotten much scarcer compared to 10 and 15 years ago. The mid-1930s definitives, which in many cases overlapped into the KGVI era, are almost impossible to find. I love those stamps but no longer feel as compelled to chase them down as I did when I considered them fully a part of my KGVI focus. I guess from time to time we all have to reinvent ourselves as philatelists as our tastes and interests naturally evolve.

shermae - excellent post! Thank you. I'd read that a developing interest in Malayan stamps from China had pushed up prices - is that the case?

Jack - I recognise to my cost the endless search for the perfect album - hard for us to recognise that it probably isn't there!

I've actually done this. Started over that it.
Some years ago I sold 98% of my collection. Since then I've started over with new areas.

It is quite 'liberating'. Making new mistakes without having to relate to decisions you made years ago is very nice.

Back then I was very much a 'collect-to-the-album' (Steiner) collector.
Now it's totally different. Liberating :-)

Like ClassicalStamps I too started over, sold my first collection in early 2000s. Resumed the hobby after my father's passing in 2009 and I inherited the balance of his collection and dealer stock (he was small-scale part time dealer in the St Lawrence Valley of New York).

Still a worldwide collector, and now have both the income and interest to not just collect worldwide, but based on a library of various specialized catalogs around the world. Use Lighthouse Vario pages to house my collection, so no constant paying for mounts. Design the page layouts based on General and Specialized catalogs for each nation that I have. Slow progress, since what I lack currently is free time (long work days as manager of Seafood Dept in huge Supermarket, combined with other hobby interests - DJing and Computer Gaming) but I plug along when I have some free time.

But could never restrict myself to one region or area, too many tempting rabbit holes of interest to fall into and follow, much like Alice in (Philatelic) Wonderland.

Hey Geoff. Thanks for your thoughts regarding Portuguese colonies. I started in with them in the mid 1970s; sold most in the early 1980s except for Timor; and restarted in earnest in the late 1980s. I use the Big Blue Scott Internationals to house my stamps. But 10 or so years ago, I got rid of the Part I pages (1840-1940) for the colonies, because they aren't comprehensive enough, and went to blank quadrille pages.

I don't know what it is about the classic Portuguese colonies that I find so attractive. Couple years ago, I wrote an article for Portu-Info, quarterly journal for the ISPP (international Society for Portuguese Philately, saying much the same. You can find the ISPP at http://portugalstamps.com . There also is a Portuguese society in Britain that you may already know of: http://pps-uk.net . Steve

Geoff- Thanks for the kind words. Malaya has been building in popularity since the mid-1990s. Sets on ebay are just as competitive as they were back then although less breadth of material is available.

I am not aware of a trend where collectors in China have embraced Malayan stamps but it would not surprise me.