What Put In A Stamp Collection

I was wondering what collectors put in their collections besides commemoratives? I'm mostly thinking about a topical collection. coins, cinderellas, etc. hope this isn't a stupid question.

You are the master of your own collection. Collect whatever you want!

My main focus is a topical collection pertaining to Esperanto and other artificial international languages. In addition to postage stamps and postal stationery honoring Esperanto and Esperanto-related events, I have covers and postcards with inscriptions in Esperanto and other similar languages and/or bearing postmarks relevant to the topic, poster stamps promoting these languages and/or advertising relevant events, and so on and so forth. It's very open-ended.

As Erilaz says - do what interests you. I recently started picking up Commercial Covers from the early 20th century. All covers are from Toronto-based companies. I want to mount them along with a picture of the building, a map showing where they were, a telephone book entry and an advertisement. Sort of an homage to Toronto industry. Just a little bit of fun outside of my normal collecting interests.

What were you thinking Mooselaab? Did you have a certain idea in mind?

Probably less than 1% of the stamps in my collection are commemoratives

I collect stamps on which I can ID the place of cancel. Don't care if they're definitives or commems, just as long as they are surely readable & identifiable.

Collect what you will. if you catch me sneering at it just me remind me you can collect and display your collection how you like.

I include banknotes -- however since banknotes are fairly expensive, I don't have a lot.

Brad905 I started collecting the Marshall Island WW2 series. I also have all the US WW2 s/s sheets. I recently acquired the series of books to go with these s/s sheets. I also have the set of steel pennies issued during WW2. Is there any thing else you think I could add? Also, what's a good way to display these items?

If you have a mixture of material, some of it non-paper based, probably best to use something like a Lighthouse Grande binder, which will enable you to mix stock pages for stamps with pages for coins. This is Lighthouse's European site, but there are US-based stockists -

https://www.leuchtturm.com/catalogs...lt/?q=grande


There will be other, cheaper alternatives along the same lines.

I forgot to add the overrun countries flags

The overrun countries issue is one of my all-time favorites.

It sounds like you've got a good start on a WWII topical collection, and there's plenty of room to grow. For the next step, I'd suggest getting the other thematically relevant stamps issued by the U.S. during or around the time of the war, such as the 1942 Win the War issue and the 1945 Iwo Jima issue, just to mention two.

Browse through catalogs (and online) and put together a want list of stamps that would be relevant. That's how I usually approach my topical collections. If it's a popular topic (and WWII is certainly that), you can find books, websites, and even groups of collectors devoted to stamps on that topic.

While I have several country specific albums, I have a self created one I call My Stamp Album which is a 3-ring binder, top loading sheet protectors, and self-created pages on 67 weight cover stock which I put back to back in the sheet protector. I put in this album anything that catches my fancy.... covers, curiosities, color variation sets, stamp stories with actuals artifacts, etc.

The beauty of your own self-created album(s) is you don't have to wait for annual supplements, you are not restricted to any specific format or subject matter, it's infinitely expandable, its always up-to-date, and it most likely gives you more satisfaction and pleasure than any standard commercially available album.

So erilaz is spot on - "You are the master of your own collection. Collect whatever you want!"

"My Stamp Album": I like that! I have a couple of Vario binders that are sort of in that vein, though I regard them as housing "Random Topics," i.e. topics with not enough pieces in the collection to warrant an album of their own. The topics reflect my interests, of course, but the diversity might be jarring to someone else, ranging from the Armenian alphabet to Till Eulenspiegel to Japanese pop stars!

Collect what makes you relax and happy . Forget what other collectors are telling you .

Adding to Floortrader's comment.......remember that stamp collecting is a hobby and not an investment vehicle, unless your name is Bill Gross. Remember that we buy at retail, but then sell at wholesale.

I don't have an active USA collection. But I have added what some might call "ephemera." In the back, I include some cinderella labels; revenue tax stamps from Indiana, my home state; several of my late father's World War II gas ration cards; etc. I have a bit of postal history, some of which will eventually get incorporated into my albums; the remainder will stay in sheet albums.

One example: I have some postcards that I sent to myself. One is from a few years ago, mailed from the top of Snezka, the high point of the Czech Republic. Another was postmarked at Plaza de Mulas base camp on Aconcagua (Argentine Andes), in January, 2004, when someone had a canceling device there and one could mail out cards.

These are things that suit me as I follow the mantra of : "collect what makes you relax and happy."

I'm probably a bit extreme in my collecting pursuits.

Having said that, I HAVE limited myself to U.S. only...

I collect what I term "in-depth" in that I'm chasing everything to do with each stamp issue. Mint singles, used with interesting cancels, postal history, plate blocks and FDC's. That is pretty standard stuff.

Where it gets more esoteric is in the collateral material. I collect the USPOD announcements, the essays, photographic publicity material and the deck cards which protected the sheets/panes and identified what they were.

So, what I'm essentially creating here would be the history of each issue as told by the production process and the marketing of each stamp.

As I said, it's a bit extreme.