Welcome to my stamp blog

Welcome to my stamp blog
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Sunday, October 30, 2016

Trip to the Wright Brothers Museum in North Carolina Nets Set of Aviation Stamps for Collection

Saturday we took our sailors to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for our military ministry activities. Among other things, we visited the Wright Brothers Museum in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the place where powered flight first began.

One of the sailors, Josh, and Yvonne found a set of stamps in the gift shop and showed me. They both know I collect stamps. So, I bought the set to add to my collection. This will be the beginning of my Space Stamp collection. I have a lot of space stamps, but just not on album pages.


A couple of weeks ago I purchased a first day cover with the Wright Brothers 1949 6 cent aviation stamp on it. I was drawn to the set at the museum because it had the mint single in it.


Eventually, I will set up the pages for these stamps that will be the introduction to my "Space" pages.

What I thought was really cool was what I found out during the ranger's presentation. That a piece of the cloth from the wing and a piece of wood from the plane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk was actually carried by Neil Armstrong aboard Apollo XI when it landed on the moon!


Friday, October 28, 2016

Why Collect Stamps?

Because it's FUN!!

OK, now that I've got the most important and easiest reason out of the way, let me elaborate.

People collect all sorts of things, for a whole variety of reasons. It really depends on what a person is interested in. Some people collect souvenir memorabilia from their favorite football, baseball, basketball, or soccer team. Some people collect old antique cars and restore them. Still others collect movies and video games. There are antique furniture collectors, and autograph collectors. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who collects it!



I think there has to be a little bit of an obsessive compulsive side to people who collect things. The idea of having the most complete collection of "whatever". Sometimes it's simply the thrill of the "hunt" for that rare, illusive, piece that will complete that "set" of anything. For others, it is the desire to posses something that is so rare that no one else has it. And then, of course, there are those who collect something so they can turn around and sell it for a handsome profit.

OK, so now why collect stamps? And more specifically, why do I collect stamps? Originally, when I was 12 years old, the Pastor Emeritus of the Lutheran church I was raised in, came to visit our family. With him he had a cigar box (why he had a cigar box I will never know) full of postage stamps from all over the world. And it was for me!! That started my collection.



I learned how to remove the stamps from the envelopes they were on by soaking them in a little bowl of water, then drying them by laying them on a clean dry surface. I learned that there were stamp stores where I could buy stamp collecting supplies like stamp tongs, adhesive stamp hinges to gently hold the stamps on album pages, and also albums that had pictures of the stamps arranged by country so I knew where to put the stamps.

As my collection of stamps from that cigar box got sorted by country, organized onto album pages, I learned about the countries where the stamps came from. I learned where they were, people who were leaders or simply famous in those countries. All because of the pictures on the stamps.

But gradually I began noticing that there were black marks across the stamps I had (postal cancellations). Sometimes they were light and didn't obstruct the picture on the stamp, but at other times they really covered the whole front of the stamp. I didn't mind the lighter cancellation marks, but I didn't like the heavy dark ones. I would put the stamps with lighter cancellations in my albums, but left the others in the box. So, I guess you could say I got a little "choosy" about the stamps I wanted to put in my albums and the ones I didn't.




This was all before the days of computers. So to buy stamps I had to go to local stamp stores where I saw stamps that were new and had never been used. They looked a lot nicer than the ones with the black marks. But I also realized very quickly that I could not afford many of them! There were so many stamps that I knew that I couldn't afford them all!

There were a lot of different ways I could have gone at that point. I could have chosen one country, or two or three. But I also noticed that there were a lot of stamps with beautiful pictures on them. There were stamps with birds, flowers, antique cars, horses, dogs, cats, flags, maps, clothes, airplanes, mountains, and any other thing I could imagine! And that is the way it is with stamps. If there is something you're interested in, there are probably stamps that have been issued with that on them.

Collecting stamps with a particular topic on it like birds, cars, Elvis Presley or anything else is called "topical collecting". Topics can be narrowed too. For instance, a person who collects stamps with birds, might narrow their collection to only collect stamps with owls or ducks.

So, I thought about the things I was personally interested in. I knew I wanted to collect one country for sure - the United States. I also wanted to collect stamps with flowers, birds, chess (yes, the game), Olympic Games, space exploration, and medicine. Do you think that narrowed things down for me? It did some, but not nearly enough! So eventually I dropped all of the other topics and focused on Olympic Sports and Space Exploration. I also decided I didn't like the look of the cancellations so limited my stamp purchases to mint never hinged stamps.


























For me, I love to look at the stamps. The pictures are like miniature works of art! It's no different than someone who buys a painting and hangs it on their wall, or a rusted out antique car and restores it to a beautiful classic automobile, or a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth. Every stamp issued is different. Each one is created by an artist first, and then turned into a stamp. Some are very realistic like the photograph of an athlete, and some are just whimsical and fun - like the stamps commemorating the Olympic sports but featuring the Disney characters.




None of my stamps are valuable. I can't afford, and I don't want to buy stamps that are expensive. So most of my stamps are very inexpensive, from a few cents in value to three or four dollars. But it isn't the monetary value of the stamps that motivates me to collect them, it is the sheer fun of it! My collection will probably never be valuable monetarily, but its value will lie in the pleasure it gives me to look at the little works of art. The things I learn about the Olympic Games and the athletes who were involved in them, as well as the international achievements in Space Exploration and the scientists, astronauts and cosmonauts who made them happen will be priceless!

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Welcome To My New Stamp Collecting Blog!


Hello! This is my new stamp collecting blog! But, I guess you could tell that from the title. The back story? Well, a little over two months ago I had surgery on my back. So I used my recovery time to pull out my stamp collection that I hadn't touched in at least sixteen years. I've collected stamps since I was 12 years old. But there have been several very long periods of inactivity, you might even call them extended years of dormancy! But the nice thing about stamp collecting is that you can pick it back up any time you want to. It's just sitting there waiting for you.

I don't collect everything, that would be impossible! I specialize in two topics: international postage stamps issued to commemorate the Olympic Games and those issued to commemorate Space Exploration. Even those two topics are still so broad that I settle for what I can get, and what I can afford rather than try to get everything.

During my recovery period working on my stamp collection became somewhat of an obsession! I didn't realize I had so many stamps I had purchased over 16 years ago and never did anything with. So I sorted my summer Olympic Games stamps into Olympic years. Then I mounted them in Showgard Mounts, designed and printed my own stamp album pages, and researched some of the stories that fit with the stamps I had.

It was fun! And it kept me from being totally bored! But one really nice thing about this is that I may have interested my seven year old grandson, Jacob, in stamp collecting too! I showed him my collection while he was staying with us for a week during our church's Vacation Bible School. When he saw my collection he said, "Oh cool!" After which I asked him if he would like to collect stamps too. He said "Sure!"


So I pulled out my stock book of duplicate stamps, and let him pick out the ones he wanted from different countries around the world. I was also going to give him an old beginners album of mine to put them in, but he said, "Oh no Opa! I want to make my own album! Can I have one of your plain three ring binders and some blank pages?" And that was it, we were off and running! At first he stood next to my desk and sorted his stamps while I worked on mine. Then he stood right next to me as I helped him, as he made his pages for each country. Soon he crawled up on my lap as we worked on his new stamp collection together.























He took his album home, and several times I asked him if he had put any more stamps in his album. Each time he said no, and then once said, "Opa, I don't want to do it at home, that's something I want to do together with you!" Talk about tugging at a grandfather's heart strings!