Need Info On Collecting Laotian Stamps

My DIL is ethnic Laotian and has expressed an interest in stamp collecting. She is also, as a first generation Laotian-American is culturally aware. She has been collecting US stamps but I'd like to gift her with a Laotian stamp album and sourcing info. I'd appreciate a heads-up on where to source her albums and stamps from.

Acronyms
DIL = Daughter in Law.

I don't really understand how forums work, but apparently rod222's reply was that my use of "DIL" as shorthand for "Daughter-In-Law" was inappropriate? So abject apologies to him and the community. However, I'd still like some hints to how I can hook up with Laotian stamp-collecting materials. Anyone else?

Hi Charlie,
not inappropriate, just can be confusing.
No malice intended.
Just consider, we have members online that come from countries all over the world. DIL is either going to confuse them, or leave them ignorant,
when we can all spend a few moments typing in full.

All is good

Regarding your Laos, your best route, perhaps, is to locate a Stamp Club near your location, or, go online search for "Laos Collection"
They are indeed, beautiful stamps.
Search this forum for examples.
https://goscf.com/t/36021 br /

You'll need to marry your intended expenditure to the lots being offered.
My experience, they are not that expensive.

Good Luck.

PS I see 600 mixed Laos ebay for circa $40
If you need them in a dedicated Album, possibly mint (unused)
you can expect to spend up to $600 >
All depends on your wallet.

Thanks, no worries. The link to Steiner was exactly what I needed. They have the album pages I want and ebay (of course) can provide her an endless supply of stamps. I really hope to jump-start her into (yet another) hobby. BTW, in my youth I did design work / paste up on stamp albums for the HE Harris company, and actually met the old man himself once. But I never became a serious collector...no doubt my great loss. Thanks again for your tips. Charlie

If you ever decide to break out your Journalist side, love to hear your experiences with the above !

LOL. I'll be going back 50+ years but I do have some memories. I worked in an office that had horizontal cabinets with the actual stamps, so when laying out the page (I'd get a roughed out sketch from the philatelic expert (and slave-driver boss) I'd pull the actual stamps and arrange them on the design sheet. This way I had the actual measurement for the lines delineating rows as well as the vertical lines between each stamp. Once I had all the proper measurements I would send that page's stamps to the photo lab and they would make b&w "veloxes" of them (reduced size b&w prints). I would have "ruled out" those dividing lines, pasted in the page metadata (Country, page number, etc.) and when the veloxes came back I'd paste them into position. All this was quite regular until I got to a page that included a valuable stamp. Those I'd have to request be brought up to me and they'd arrive with a guard who stood over me while I got the necessary measurements and reviewed the entire page arrangement with the stamps in position. Once I was happy he'd take the stamp to the photog and (I assume) stand over him while he produced the velox. After that, he went back downstairs with the stamp, returning it to the Cavern of Valuable Stamps. I really liked the job although we were held to +/- 1/64th of an inch, and the slave-driver boss would review every page with a rule and magnifying glass. The office was in the South Station just off the wharfs in Boston, Mass, and we'd venture out to lunch at one of the hundred or so restaurants in the area in nice weather (about 8 months of the year). I'll confess I hadn't thought about those days in quite awhile...Anyhow, if you ever wondered how stamp albums were created, it was by one handmade page at a time. :-)

Marvelous Charlie
I spent quite a few years living in Northern Thailand, and would have to
regularly travel to Laos to renew my Visa.
Lovely country, the little I saw of it.

Charlie -

Great story about working for HE Harris in Boston designing album pages. I had a "slave-driver boss" myself for awhile.

I live in Iowa, USA and I collect Laos stamps. I just use black Vario pages and simple 3-ring binders for my collection. I started collecting Laos stamps many years ago when I met people originally from Laos in my job.


At the end of the Vietnam War, there were many refugees. The Governor of Iowa was Robert D. Ray, and he started his own resettlement effort, and brought the Tai Dam people to Iowa. See this link...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_Dam_people

Robert D. Ray would call churches in Iowa and get them to help sponsor one refugee family at a time. Many of the Tai Dam worked jobs encoding checks and operating check sorters at banks, insurance companies and payment processors. I used to service their machines, and I got to know them. They were hard working, good people. This is how I started to collect Laos stamps. One time I brought my collection to work to show them, but it brought tears to their eyes as they remembered Laos. Many had lost family members during the war.

Laos stamps make a good collection. Thanks for sharing your story.

Linus

I was curious as to the "Veloxes"
https://filmphotographyproject.com/...el-darkroom/

Thanks for the interesting article re veloxes. As a teen I attended a trade school and my trade was a relatively new-fangled printing process, offset lithography. We learned all aspects of the trade including process photography, that being use of a large horizontally-mounted camera with a fixed, vacuum backboard for holding the sheet film (inside the darkroom) and the movable copyboard and lights on the outside of the darkroom. Using that equipment we would make negatives of line art, halftones, and color separations to be used in making the printing plates. We also used the darkroom for our personal photography, developing 35mm film and enlargements. All of the photographic materials were donated - expired - including film, paper, development chemicals, and such. So I related to your referenced article...altho none of ours was more than a few years out of date. As it turned out, I only worked in the trade a short while, being attracted to other technologies, eventually, inevitably, computers. But my printing background led me to art collecting, especially stone lithos and others of the graphics arts; serigraphs, etchings, woodcuts, etc. In fact, shortly after graduation my knowledge in the trade got me the job at H E Harris. My expertise with a ruling pen and paste-up techniques helped me beat out the competition. I just sent my daughter-in-law a commemorative boxed set for the transcontinental railroad 150 years anniversary, and included a linen tester with it since the set includes color proofs of the yellow, magenta, cyan, black, and gold foil inks. She's got a good curious sense and I hope to inspire her to learn about the printing process behind the stamps. After all, many of the error stamps derive some of their value from exposing something of the process thru the error - think an upside down plane on the airmail stamp, which reveals that multiple plates are used to produce a single image. Anyhow, thanks for getting me going on the Laos stamp trail. I ordered the CD of all the downloads offered so I can produce an album specifically for her.

Linus, my daughter-in-law's family came as refugees following the war and settled in Rochester, NY. There they started a Thai restaurant ("...same food but Americans didn't know what Lao food was so we called it Thai...). They have just recently retired and nicer people you couldn't meet. I looked up the Vario pages and that looks like a really good approach. The history of the Tai Dam is fascinating. I'll have to ask my daughter-in-law about that ethnic group. Thanks for the response and the interesting link...

Welcome!

Dale

Thanks for the welcome. This forum seems to have very nice, welcoming folks. In fact, thanks to all that have responded. :-)