Stamp Collecting Is Now 3 Seperate Hobbies

I'll let my "arrogant ego" take over for a moment: I'm not a stamp collector. I'm a philatelist and a postal analyst.

Don't forget the hoarding stage!

Yes, but all hobbies are like this. If I work on classic cars, it's the same. There are people who love classic cars and buy them, but never work on them. There are people who work on them all the time. There are people who do a little work, but let craftsmen do the hard stuff. There are people who talk about classic cars, but don't own any. There are people who only sell them, but don't want to own any. And so on. Anything you do regarding stamps makes you some type of "stamp collector." It's like being anything else -- there are lots of different types of everything, including every profession and every hobby.

I once read about a fairly well-to-do collector who I think was either a doctor or a lawyer, and who loved stamps. But he was always busy. He had collected as a child, and he had a nice adult collection still, but he was a busy man. He intended to work on his collection full time at some point, however, so he started buying collections from auctions. He had them sent to his home office which was over the garage out of the way of his family. He loved bidding, and he loved getting new material. But he found very little time to take the new material out of the boxes. So most he left for later -- when he could get to them. Every week another box or two would arrive, and he'd put it over in the corner to be opened later. Sometimes he found a little time to open one, but most remained sealed. As the years went by, the boxes built up. He could never keep up with opening them, let alone cataloguing everything. Years went by. He was always busy, always working late with never enough time. Then one day he died. His office was filled with unopened boxes. They were filled with stamp albums and stamp collections he'd never even seen.

Was he a "stamp collector"? Yes, he was. Just not a typical collector.

I once knew a man such as DrewM described. He was a businessman...very busy, but a very knowledgeable collector. We used to travel to stamp shows and auctions together. On one of the trips I asked him how he organized his collection, since I knew he bought a lot of better material. He told me it was all kept in boxes, since he did not have time for albums and such. Said he'd get around to it some day.

Most members here don't attend major stamp auctions and sit for hours and even days looking at the large collections/accumalations that show up at the end of the auction . They would be amazed how many of those lots show material in the original packaging as the former owner purchased and never broke it down but left it just as they got it .......then you would understand my posting in the opening of this chapter .

OMG- remember the 1970's Roberta Flack song "Killing Me Softly?" Floortrader totally shamed me- I am apparently good at the "FIRST" portion of his schema, but I TOTALLY suck at the second part. What's more embarrassing is that I have no intention to use anything but Vario pages to mount my collection, which is far easier than mounting items into an album.

What about Society memberships and the many related aspects? Authoring articles? Doing research? We could go on and on, but I'm with rog...one hobby with a seemingly endless amount of sub-sets...

Morning all,

A home is a house full of the clutter of a life well lived. Nice pictures of houses turned into homes.

Stamp collecting's deepest nature is that of a doomed fight against entropy...

People ask me what I do in my spare time, and I say, "I collect stamps" or, "I am a stamp collector". When their eyes glaze over, I know I have given them as complete an answer as they want. When at a stamp show/auction/etc, I am not asked what is my hobby - I am asked more specific questions about what I do within the hobby. THEN, when I get glazed-over eyes, I know I am a TRULY boring human being.

An outsider would probably say that we are all stamp collectors, and that's it. When we converse amongst ourselves, we may find conversation focusing on particular aspects of what we do - probably because we all:
1) Buy
2) Hoard
3) Organize somehow
4) Specialize in a particular field (topicals, 3c 1851's, errors, etc)
5) Sell

And if a particular person doesn't do all of these, he/she knows what those activities are.

I have other hobbies with similar activities as in stamp collecting (buying, hoarding, etc), but when I am trolling ebay for coins (for example), I think of myself as a coin collector and not a coin buyer. This is definitely a gray area subject to semantic interpretation. YMMV, and looking at the responses here, clearly it does!

Good morning all,

Collecting for the enjoyment of collecting, whatever that might be, is the name of the game. Don't hesitate to ask questions especially if you need basic information and especially more advanced sources of information for any possible topic. You should be able to find folks on this board a little further along on their collecting journey glad to share experiences. Russ

PS: What does YMMV stand for? Could not find it in my old philatelic terms dictionary.

Russ, YMMV in an anacronym for Your Mileage May Vary

I can't say that I've ever bought stamps at auction, then put them away without doing anything with them. The fun is in opening the lot, smiling with delight or gasping in horror, then putting the new additions into albums (or into stock-books/cards en route for albums). My past failing has been not to bring together my sorted duplicates. I've spent this year doing that, and getting cheap country lots onto ebay. They don't make much, but boxes under the bed make nithing at all. I also now get the off-cuts from newly bought auction lots onto ebay as soon as possible, to avoid further build-up.

Face it. Its a disease.

Let's not forget the part of the hobby which is lying to the wife on what you've spent on them and what they're worth.