Hello From The Middle Of The St Lawrence River …

I currently live on an island that is closer to upstate New York but is in Canada, but I was raised in Toronto and lived there for a very long time. I have great memories of buying packages of stamps on paper at Woolworths for 89 cents in the 1960s, and rushing home to fill the bath tub with hot water to liberate my stamps so I could stick hinges on them and fill my album.

I could not find any other stamp collectors at school and my mother wouldn't let me go to the local stamp club - too dangerous - so I lost interest.

Along came the pandemic in 2020 and the wonders of Zoom. First came presentations from the Letter Box Study Group and the American Topical Association to Women's Institute members in the UK (and their Canadian visitors), Next I found the British Empire Study Group. Then the Collector's Club had me searching for my local stamp club and begging them to take my membership fee even though they weren't able to meet.

Four years later I have worked through the "buy all those $5 shoeboxes of stamps" at the club bourse stage, followed by the "I need one of those" after every Zoom presentation stage. I have narrowed my interests a little:

Semi-postals and revenues
Slogan cancels featuring charities or post office automation
Newfoundland
Iceland
Scandinavia
Germany

Google image search has often led me here and I have learned so much. Thank you for accepting me as a member!

Welcome !


Peter

Must be fun to live on one of the thousand islands. Welcome. This forum is great for learning more about stamps.

Greetings and welcome back to the hobby. A lot of islands out there in the St. Lawrence (somewhere around 1,000, I suppose) ... I have not been in many years, but used to go across Wolfe Island all the time to take the ferry to Kingston. We had summer camps just south of Cape Vincent.

Welcome. I will be spending a week in July by Landons Bay. I never get tired of this region. Perhaps I should pop by in my Pungo? (kayak)

Welcome back to collecting and now to our merry band!

Welcome to SCF!! There are many of us who share a similar story of starting collecting when we were young, then coming back after life got in the way. I started collecting Canada this year and have fallen in love with the stamps, their history, and beautiful engraving.

Scott

Friend of Phil,

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. Sounds like you are a perfect candidate to become a postal history collector?

Wishing you many enjoyable future days in our hobby. Russ