The Biggest Downs Of Your Stamp Collecting Experience.

I feel for all and the shortcomings you've had in interpersonal relations with dealers and other collectors. I seldom encounter other collectors since I'm basically a "bowling alone" style of collector.

I can truthfully say that I have never had a bad experience with a dealer. As a kid in the mid-1960s, one of my biggest philatelic thrills ever was hopping the bus to downtown Indianapolis, to the Ayres department store, and getting to buy a couple of cheap sets from Jacques Minkus himself. He was in town to open a stamp counter in the department store. Even though I was just a high schooler and obviously didn't have much money to spend, he still treated me like royalty.

Only one stamp damage problem I can recall. Few years ago, I wiped out a copy of St. Thomas & Prince 144 trying to get some hinge remnant off. That was about an $80-90 lesson to be more careful. Steve

The biggest down.... I had my brother and family over for visit - and me and him had finally got our wifes out of the house - so we were really keen for some uninterrupted stampy time. The obstacle was that we also had to babysit our children simultaneously -at the time we had 4 girls between us, from 1 - 4 years old. Anyway - the girls were playing with their dolls upstairs - or so we thought they were - and we were stamping away - until we heard a scream from upstairs. We ran to see what was going on, and the first that met us was the smell of kebab. The oldest girl at 4 had taken the jar of kebab-spice and pretty much spread it all over the 2nd floor. The scream was from the girl at age 3 - she had got inside my brothers bag, found a bottle of watermark liquid, miraculously managed to open it - and had taken a good sip. She was complaining that it hurt badly in here stomach, so my brother rushed away with her to the hospital. Luckily the result was that the watermark liquid actually was totally unharmful in small amounts - so no injury inflicted. The true damage that was caused that day was that our wifes from that point on started to literally hate our dear hobby....and our liberty for 'stampy-time' from that day has been much more restricted

@Floortrader - thank you for sharing your personal experience. So sad how humans can hurt each other, often without even realizing it. I understand now a little more the psychology and history why you keep saying you will have a 'decent' collection some time a few years into the future. Ignore what that fool said back then and the image he created - no reason to keep thinking your collection will be decent some day - it already is. And it probably was quite decent already back then, at least for a 16 year old.

I guess floors experience can serve as a lesson for all of us to remain open and including for any fellow collector, regardless of age, interest, level of collecting or number of albums. It's so easy for us to comment on others images as common junk - whilst for a new collector it might be considered a treasure - lets remain humble.

I was always told that these were called 'life lessons' and the take away was to double down and use the negative experiences as motivation to improve.

Without the rainy days we wouldn't appreciate the sunshine?
Don

Discovering that some of my stamps had gotten stuck down. I had put them in a closet that had 2 walls that were outside walls and during the winter it had gotten cold enough that humidity had condensed. It was only part of my collection and nothing real expensive, but it really took the wind out of my sails.

My biggest down was after my then wife and I where in a car accident money was tight so I decided to sell my extensive North West Pacific Island stamp collection.
After visiting 3 dealers (1 offering $5000 on the spot), the general consensus from all of them was to put the collection in the hands of a auction house where my return would be greater, how wrong where they!! Just under $2000 after the commissions , many key items where not separated and the collection was broken up into 3 mini collections and described poorly.
Lesson learnt and not the best first time selling at auction experience.

My biggest was probably the time I ordered a set of expertized Berlin red overprints from an ebay seller in Germany. That set was all I needed to complete my Berlin collection on Steiner pages (as listed by Scott). My anticipation of their arrival was palpable, but the shipment disappeared as soon as it hit the NY customs office. The seller sent it registered mail, which is tantamount to putting a flashing neon "steal me" sticker on it. I ended up getting my money back and ultimately got another set, but man, was I chapped about it for awhile.

I was about fourteen and there were a few of us kids in the neighborhood who collected stamps. A neighbor girl who new I collected stamps wanted to show me the stamps her grandfather gave her. She took the mint RW1 duck stamp out of the collection to show me and just at that point her pet cockatiel flew by and grabbed it with its beak. Punched a hole right in the center of it. Ouch.

txstamp:
Wow... did they ever find the stamp? I don't expect it would have even been worth much anymore- due to dust etc.

Its so interesting (and saddening) to hear all your stories.

50 posts

We all have our own stamp cave or corner bookbndrbob! My cave is in the corner of my office- piles of albums and probably £200 worth of kiloware!

I'm sorry if I can't reply to everyone! I'm still groggy this morning.

While reading above about mint stamp sticking to pages due to humidity, has anyone used silica gel successfully to prevent this?

The C3a was found but is of course now badly damaged.

This thread makes me want cake.

floortrader's experience reminds me of one time, where I was still pretty young to be a stamp collector - which means in my early 30s. I was starting to put a specialized collection of stamps together, and I was very green - everything was new to me. An experienced exhibitor of this, sat down with me for an entire evening and we exchanged notes. All in all, a mostly enjoyable evening, however, the only thing that I remember well from that evening is when he told me that I had "student stamps". "oh yes, these are student stamps ....". It was his way of placing me way beneath him. Now, I had a lot of the same stuff he had, more coverage actually, because he wouldn't even buy a stamp unless it had 4 margins. I had rarities he couldn't even dream of owning since they don't exist as he collected them. He was friendly to me, so I won't knock it too much, but the whole thing was a bit too elitist for me, and permanently left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'll take my "student stamps" and raise you a piece of cake!

It's disheartening to find out how dumb one can be when one allows these three things to come into close proximity: a stamp album full of self-made-pages + a small aquarium + the world's most cunning cat!
Result: re-self-making a big bunch of those album pages in order to re-mount the stamps after they dried out.