How Did You Figure Out/Narrow Down The Areas You Collect.

I'm finishing getting my stamps pulled together from all the different areas and binders they are in and organized. I have a world wide collection but wanna focus on one area but not sure what.

How did you narrow down to what you collect now? Did you always know, or did it come later?

Narrow down my collection areas...I wish I could!

My two cents,

What got you started on stamps, what peaked your interest, do you remember the first stamps you started with. For me is was a block of four stamps with Abraham Lincoln. History is what drove me to collect. Now 35 years later after doing all I could on US classic stamps (costs got to be more than I wanted), my new interest is Confederate States Stamps. I guess it did come all the way back to Lincoln in some ways. I do have a worldwide collection but it is mostly focused on places I have visited as I lived outside the US for 6 years for work.

No wrong or right way but but collect what you like and enjoy it and you will always finds new areas of interest.

Hobsun

In my case, my wallet made the decision.

That said, I SHOULD have just sold off my U.S. plate block collection (rather than expanding it like I did) and concentrated on my U.S. singles.

I did ultimately decide to stop collecting most U.S. self-adhesive stamps. The primary exceptions are the limited lifetime, high $ denomination stamps such as the Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express issues. Those, especially the plate blocks, will do nothing but get more valuable over time (and expensive for my heirs to add had I not already collected them).

After 20+ years, looking back I would like to enter:
1. What catches your eye?
2. What can you afford?
3. How 'deep' do you want to go?
-here is a great point, subscribe to Linns stamp news, read it from front to back, pay attention to the want adds, dabble in the auction market, learn all you can and THEN decide...

After collecting anything that came my way and working with a Big Blue album (Scott International) for many years, I decided to cut back.

1. Nothing past 1940 (except some GB commonwealth, then 1952)

2. I went through my album page by page and graded each county yes, no , maybe.

3. I rank ordered the yeses 1-10.

I have managed to stick with #1, so-so for #2, abject failure with #3, as I keep being lured by maybes and even some nos.

Good luck with better resolve than me.

I am interested in cars/hot rods, light houses, and ships. I know there is a decent amount of ships, some light houses. Hot rods, I have not seen on stamps. Do love animation. So far topical. If I went the other way, I would love civil war but pocket says no. I'm thinking maybe ww2 Europe and maybe america.

I started as a worldwide collector 62 years ago ....still a worldwide collector .

As I have aged/changed/evolved (hopefully) so have my tastes. For example, I really didn't care much for imperfs or definitive stamps in my young adulthood. Now I can't get enough of them, especially the latter.

Started with U.S. almost 6 decades ago because both my father and best friend were U.S. collectors. For the last few years the holes became harder to fill with examples that were both pleasing and affordable, to the point where I was only adding 1 or 2 stamps per year to my collection. Finally gave up and put the whole U.S. collection in the bank where it sits today.

Instead I decided to look WW for something to collect. In the last year I've gone from KG to QE to Seychelles Islands to birds to sailing ships. I really like the ships (for now), but who knows what will grab my interest next?

When I was young I started collecting topical stamps - began with cars, later expanded into ships, planes and trains as well. Then I became interested in birds stamps and maintained a collection for a couple of years until I lost interest.

Meanwhile, my father seriously collected Malta and then he became interested in Commonwealth stamps, so he built a small collection. When I got a bit older, we merged the transport/birds collections with the Commonwealth collection plus my father's childhood collection of common worldwide stamps. Since then, I have collected worldwide stamps, although my focus now lies mainly on Malta, then Commonwealth and then the rest of the world.

Once my Malta collection was almost complete (except for some very expensive stamps) I became interested in Malta revenues, which quickly became my favourite collecting area. Over time, I also expanded my interest into Commonwealth and later worldwide revenues. Today, my main interests are the revenues of Malta, the UK and India, although I still constantly add to all the other collections, both postage and revenue.

I like my US collection but like others after 40 + years, the cost of filling spaces was starting to get prohibitive. Back in the 80s, I purchased a WW album to 1955 because of the US in it. I occasionally bought additional mixed WW lots through the years. Sometime around 2002, I finally decided to switch my focus to that 1955 album but decided it was not good enough. I decided to start buying WW lots and found a used set of Scott Blue Internationals (Vol 1 - 5) as a way to get stamps to work with and the hunt was on. Now back to your original question. I decided at the beginning of this year to actually work through all of the various boxes, bags, stockbooks, etc. and organize everything to trade, sell, donate, put in albums or display, and reduce the oddities to a smaller amount. Still working through the process but it has focused my collecting to mainly Big Blue volume 1 and the US mint (to 1985) and US used (to present). The cleaning and going through boxes has been a great adventure. It has kept me from buying more random stuff, which was one of the goals. Hopefully by the end of the year, I will be a better organized collector. Maybe...

Narrow down? Maybe for some, but in my case my collecting interests keep, for the most part, expanding. As a kid, I started with US mint and used. In my first return to collecting, I stopped collecting US mint to focus on US used, but expanded into used PNC singles. In my second return to collecting, my interest expanded to WW used, WW perfins, US precancels, US revenues, and US cut squares.

Great question. Thanks!! My late father started me on world wide collecting at age 10 in spring, 1960. About 3 years ago, as I'm aging with no heirs, I decided it was time to cut back. I basically have 4 specialties, and some "retained" collections that I'm adding little, if anything. My worldwide was built on Parts 1 through V of the Big Blue International series, 1840-1965. A few countries went into the early 1970s.

Specialty areas and why: 1) Portugal & colonies. Always liked the look of the 1914-1930 Ceres issues. Started in 1970s, sold most around 1980. Resumed in late '80s. Lots of inexpensive shade & perf varieties. 2) Mexico: added this a few years ago. Fascinating area with all the district overprints on the classics, cancel varieties, shades. 3) Poland: I'm part Polish and have traveled there several times. 4) British East Africa: another fascinating area where I have traveled numerous times.

Retained areas, but not adding: 1) North America: for me, it's US, Canada & provinces, Greenland, St. Pierre & Miquelon, UN-NY. 2) German speaking (I'm also part German). 3) general British Commonwealth 4) "select" Eastern Europe: Russia, Finland, Baltics. Still thinking on South America and Italian area. Everything else is either gone or going; some to auction and most as donations to Rocky Mountain Philatelic Library.

Steve ,sounds like your a worldwide collector . But doing stuff like me ,building specialized collections .

The best part of a worldwide collection is it is never boring because there is always something new to work on . Right now working on the Turkish OX-HEADS ,nobody knows how to identify the fakes from the real ones,other than the catalogs say forgeries exist . Finished my HELIGOLAND collection ,this is beyond just mounting the 3 different reprints and the originals which a lot of experts can identify but gone past that to the different printings of the reprints .
Looking forward to building a collection of fake and forgeries of the first issues of TIBET , G. Flack explained the six different sets of forgeries that exist before his death. What I like to do is display these different forgeries in complete sets with the originals . That doesn't stop me from expanding my collection of FIUME with all the types of overprints on the later issues ,I've given up on the early Fiume overprints after looking at a book about all the different overprints of these first issues on the Hungary stamps ,what a nightmare ! It would be worst than all the months I spend on my watermarks of Brazil ,never want to do that again .

After being a WW collector for a number of years, I eventually settled on early Spanish stamps. I liked the designs and the challenge of weeding out all the forgeries. I also liked the possibility of finding scarce postmarks. Eventually however, I found that new items (that I could afford) were becoming fewer and fewer so I added early stamps of Denmark and Sweden because they could be purchased at relative bargains in quantity, and give me stamps to study.
Then, last year I ran across a large WW collection, mostly unsorted, locally for a good price. This spurred my WW interest again. Luckily, I never got rid of any of my old WW stamps and with Steiner pages and programs like AlbumEasy, I can create a worldwide collection with a specialist flare.
So, in short, I started out in WW, narrowed down to Spain, Denmark and Sweden, and now I've come full circle back to WW.
Since I don't know how many years I have left in me I would rather spend my hobby time with stamps, any stamps. This is why collecting WW is better for me as I near my retirement years. If I never buy another stamp I will probably still have enough stamps to keep me busy all the way up until the end.