Are You Still A Philatelist If -----

bundles of stamps make good insulation for houses.. if you're looking to build one?

I'm with everyone else here it seems. The only way a stamp gets throw in the trash is when it is damaged.

RINGO!

My two cents: anything damaged goes into the trash. Retain anything in good condition.

I have a artist/craftsperson friend that I send a box of common stuff to every year or so. I have usually kept all of the interesting cancels or any with better centering.

I'll throw out damaged stamps, as well as "Nonprofit Org." stamps from junk mail that I've already saved far too many of. I get a lot of stamps that I don't really collect on my mail (especially ebay purchases from stamp dealers). If the cover looks interesting, I'll save it, but I put the other stamps in a box and take them to WESTPEX to donate to the kids' room.

I'm with gmot

Since I don't have many duplicates right now. I prefer to keep what I have.i just started off about 6 months back, so long way to go....

For the moment, I keep spares in glassines by country. At some point, I will try to sell/trade them.

damaged go into the recycle bin. undamaged go to some way to get them to young collectors, such as, for examle, BALPEX.

Only the damaged get trashed. I tare them in little pieces and make a small pile of them, then spread them out and look at all the colors and think I should make something here, but I never do!

Nope, I just don't have the heart to put any into the trash or the woodstove unless they are damaged. Even common stamps are still little pieces of history to me, and that, imo, makes them worth preserving.

My thinking is that if there are collectors who are starting out with a country they may need some of the more common ones. A couple of years back I started collecting Canada so to fill my collection I needed to find a source for material. So to ebay I went to look for stamps to start the journey. To have for sale cheap packets of even common stamps were appreciated.

Agree with your posting VACUUM MAN . Selling and buying country collections on ebay is the best way to build a nice collection.

Luckily I didn't throw away or otherwise get rid of a huge stash of Great Britain Machins most of which I got in a kiloware packet about 45 years ago and the rest I cut off of envelopes I received in the mail over the years. When I really started collecting Great Britain seriously about 5 years ago I started going through the stash of Machins and started first of all mounting used varieties to accompany the mint ones in the collection, then I found a few se-tenant pairs from booklet panes on piece that I'd overlooked before, those went in the album, and the most interesting piece of all was one cut from an envelope sometime in the early 1970's just after decimalization, and interestingly,with just two stamps it demonstrated three different types of mixed franking, because one of them was a Wales regional stamp in old pence and with the Wilding portrait, and the other was a standard Great Britain Machin head in new pence. I'm not sure, but the mixing of old and new pence might have been illegal at the time. I know that in terms of coinage, any old coins that did not convert exactly to the new decimal system were no longer valid, for example old shilling and two shilling coins were OK because they equalled 5 and 10 new pence respectively, but the old halfpenny, penny and threepence were no longer valid.