Happy New Year To New Folks!

Greetings and happy 2024 to this community!

I am rediscovering stamps in my late thirties after about 25 years of other hobbies. Collecting stamps scratches several itches for me:
- Visually, I love them as miniature windows into history, geography, and culture.
- As a collector-type, I love the strength and breadth of the philatelist community.
- As a mildly-obsessive type, I love the opportunity to sort, organize, research, and catalog a collection that can be ever-changing.
- As an amateur treasure hunter, I love that there may be no end to the hunt, depending on my interests.

For now, I'm gathering a diverse worldwide connection with no parameters. It's quickly becoming clear that my sanity would appreciate some specialization. I tend to be a completist, so I'm wary of choosing countries and biting off more than I can chew. I'm thinking of trying to go topical to make it more fun and loosely structured.

I'm looking forward to connecting with others here in the coming years. Happy New Year!

Welcome.
Don

IMO, the only way to scratch the completist itch, is to pick an end date for a collection (whatever the country or topic may be).

MessySandwich

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.

My personal bias is a used stamp loses the story of its journey in the postal service when it is removed from the cover it transported to its destination. Collecting postal history adds a whole new aspect to your journey in our hobby.

Wishing you many enjoyable future days in our hobby. Russ

One way to collect stamps from a country that has an end are as mentioned to choose a date. For US stamps I concentrate on current issues and go back as far as 2012 in this focus. Of course I do get stamps BEFORE 2012 but it is done as a secondary pursuit and with the intent to get some stamps for anther hobby I enjoy - postcrossing. But there are other ways to limit a collection.

A) Choose a "dead" country that is one that doesn't exist. Or a country that no longer issues stamps - the top contender being Iceland which in early 2021 stopped issuing stamps and the only recent one issued was simply a commemorative of postal history. So Iceland has basically stopped producing stamps with the only exception being an occasional commemorative issue every few years.

B) Choose a historic period of a country --- for the United Kingdom you could try to collect stamps from reign of King George VI UK stamps (avoiding the British Commonwealths to keep the size manageable or focus on British Commonwealth King George VI stamps as another example).

C) Choose to collect overprints from a country or special stamps ("back of book) such as revenue and special delivery stamps from one country.

Of course topical collecting can be fun but it still runs the risk of being overwhelmed -- just try to collect all stamps featuring the birds of North America!!! You would be surprised how large such a collection can be.

It can be just as valuable to pick a beginning date for a collection. I run to a fairly firm set of parameters for my collection- MNH definitives, dues, and officials from 1900-1970. I also collect some, but not all, air post stamps for the countries I collect. There are a variety of reasons I don't collect 19th century stamps, the primary reason being stamps of this era don't appeal to me visually.

And welcome to the fray Messy!

I had thought about that for a second, then realized history gives us all a hard beginning date cut-off of 1840.