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A whole new jargon...
Returning to philately after... a whole lotta years!
I don't remember when I started collecting stamps, but no doubt I started to do so after my grandmother showed me some of the stamps my grandfather had collected during the early part of the 20th century.
I do remember finding an ad for a stamp company (H.E. Harris?) on a matchbook cover one summer at camp, offering some really great deal for almost nothing if one agreed to look at other stamps sent along "on approval." It was a year or three after my dad had died, and I remember I lost track of the approvals and ended up spending some colossal amount of money (at least for me, at the time) to pay for them.
All the while, stamps kept me entertained by supplying me with huge amounts of trivia (Danish stamps say "Danmark," Swiss stamps say "Helvetica," and French seemed to be the language of an awful lot of countries in Africa, including an exotic-sounding place called "République du Togo" or "République Togolaise" in French).
Once I got really started, my grandmother let me cut and soak the stamps from old envelopes so I could add them to my collection, which in retrospect turns out to have been not such a good idea, as stamped envelopes (called covers by collectors) have, over the years, turned out to be quite valuable. A number of rather mundane stamps listed in my catalog of French issues are 25 or more times more valuable if they have been used and are still on the original envelope.
Somewhere short of college, I quit collecting when it became clear to me that trying to collect everything was simply not feasible. Unlike most collectors, I could not bring myself to take the next logical step, which was to specialize. Some folks specialize in a country (e.g., United States) or group of countries (e.g., British Empire), others specialize in stamps that touch upon a certain topic (e.g., art, seashells, space).
What tipped me across the line and resparked my current interest was running across an envelope of French stamps that my mother had bought for me during the summer she spent in Lyon, and they struck a cord now (even if they didn't back then and are not particularly valuable today).
After flipping through my old album - which I have kept all of these years - and in response to whatever goes on between my ears on the subconscious level, I've decided to concentrate on French stamps, particularly those issued before 1950.
If there are all sorts of philatelic terms that are new to me, there is also an Internet and Google to help decipher them. The latest of these have been BOB (Back Of the Book, to describe stamps typically cataloged at the back end of catalogs, such as postage due, revenue, and newspaper stamps) and SON (Socked On the Nose, to describe stamps that bear a complete - or largely complete - postmark cancellation showing city and date).
Always something new.
Cheers...
I don't remember when I started collecting stamps, but no doubt I started to do so after my grandmother showed me some of the stamps my grandfather had collected during the early part of the 20th century.
I do remember finding an ad for a stamp company (H.E. Harris?) on a matchbook cover one summer at camp, offering some really great deal for almost nothing if one agreed to look at other stamps sent along "on approval." It was a year or three after my dad had died, and I remember I lost track of the approvals and ended up spending some colossal amount of money (at least for me, at the time) to pay for them.
All the while, stamps kept me entertained by supplying me with huge amounts of trivia (Danish stamps say "Danmark," Swiss stamps say "Helvetica," and French seemed to be the language of an awful lot of countries in Africa, including an exotic-sounding place called "République du Togo" or "République Togolaise" in French).
Once I got really started, my grandmother let me cut and soak the stamps from old envelopes so I could add them to my collection, which in retrospect turns out to have been not such a good idea, as stamped envelopes (called covers by collectors) have, over the years, turned out to be quite valuable. A number of rather mundane stamps listed in my catalog of French issues are 25 or more times more valuable if they have been used and are still on the original envelope.
Somewhere short of college, I quit collecting when it became clear to me that trying to collect everything was simply not feasible. Unlike most collectors, I could not bring myself to take the next logical step, which was to specialize. Some folks specialize in a country (e.g., United States) or group of countries (e.g., British Empire), others specialize in stamps that touch upon a certain topic (e.g., art, seashells, space).
What tipped me across the line and resparked my current interest was running across an envelope of French stamps that my mother had bought for me during the summer she spent in Lyon, and they struck a cord now (even if they didn't back then and are not particularly valuable today).
After flipping through my old album - which I have kept all of these years - and in response to whatever goes on between my ears on the subconscious level, I've decided to concentrate on French stamps, particularly those issued before 1950.
If there are all sorts of philatelic terms that are new to me, there is also an Internet and Google to help decipher them. The latest of these have been BOB (Back Of the Book, to describe stamps typically cataloged at the back end of catalogs, such as postage due, revenue, and newspaper stamps) and SON (Socked On the Nose, to describe stamps that bear a complete - or largely complete - postmark cancellation showing city and date).
Always something new.
Cheers...