INTRODUCTION

Not really - but that's not a bad place to start.........

Collecting stamps today poses lots of problems and decisions. When I started collecting at the age of six, I would walk or ride the bus downtown (depending if I planned to spend my 6-cent bus fare on stamps) to our local stamp store in San Bernardino, CA and there sort through the “penny box”. I started collecting world stamps and enjoyed trying to fill all the squares provided in my album. It didn’t take long before I realized that the world was a huge place and beyond my budget to fill my album. I re-focused my interest on US stamps only. Trying to fill my now new album – US Postage Stamps – was fun and I commenced to fill all the squares with stamps I could afford (and at the age of 11 or 12 that would be stamps selling around one dollar – the amount of money I made off of two lawn mowings and my $0.50 weekly allowance). Some of the early stamps were out of my budget range … so … on these I focused on less-than-desirable scrub versions. This made for a beautiful and colorful collection with few holes. Then other interests crept into my life, my collecting interests waned and I ceased collecting. (No it wasn’t playing with girls – it was playing sports!).

Anyway, getting back into the hobby of stamps many years later was difficult – lots of year gaps, sky-rocketing prices ... but most of all, an album that was mundane and not attractive – black and white pictures in squares provided for each specific stamp. I toyed with the idea of putting in narratives to accompany the stamps – thus creating a miniature history of the US. So I looked around for some type of album that would provide this sort of information on each US issue, but without luck. I said to myself - self - wouldn’t it be nice to have an informational page that addressed each issue and use this page in lieu of my mundane stamp album? It was here that I stumbled across USPOD stamp announcements and USPS Souvenir Pages. These announcements and Pages seemed to be just the trick. So my interest peaked again and off I went on a new endeavor into the world of stamp collecting.

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Thus, I created my own stamp album using these stamp announcements and Souvenir Pages. I purchased Safekeeper albums (self-contained dust-cover notebooks with top-loading polyethylene plastic sleeves, sealed on the ring side) and inserted these informational announcements and Pages into the plastic sleeves. I then started collecting philatelic material concerning each stamp and putting it in each appropriate stamp sleeve … mint stamps, coil plate-number strips, plate-block strips, first-day-canceled stamp announcements, first-day ceremony programs, and Souvenir Pages (the latter two the USPS issues on subscription). To date, my album collection encompasses a staggering 120 volumes! Oh – my, but it’s great and I do enjoy looking at my mini-history of America through stamps. I’ve scanned in most of my material and look at it in either hard copy or over my website. Below is a picture of me holding one of my albums showing Cary Grant (Obverted and normal - which I'll get to in a minute) in front of my closet that I modified with five shelves to hold all my albums.

Back to basics – stamp collecting. All this time I focused on US stamps, both major and minor varieties. The stamp announcements and Souvenir Pages did the trick as a placeholder for each stamp, less some varieties, such as postal stationary and issues prior to 1959 that these sources didn’t encompass. I have enhanced my collection by adding Pages produced by Jim Canon’s 50th Anniversary Pages that start in 1935 and will go into the 1959’s, where the stamp announcements started. So my albums span a time period of about 70 years, a period that exceeds my age (barely)! I now had a way to keep track of each stamp and all its varieties by accumulating them and placing them in each stamp plastic sleeve. Briefly, major varieties include sheet, booklet and coil versions of each stamp; minor varieties would further subdivide into unique plate numbers, gum types, manufacturer, color differences, tagged and untagged, reprints, etc.