Things You'll Need:
- Stamp tongs
- Stamp album (a three-ring binder and pages printed off the Internet onto acid-free paper is a low-budget alternative to higher-end albums)
- Envelopes for sorting stamps
- Stamp price guide and/or inventory software to keep track of your collection
- Stamp hinges for used stamps and mounts for mint stamps
-
Step 1
Have a goal. Decide if you want quantity or quality, if you want to collect many countries or specialize in a few (or a region) and if you want to collect by topic or type. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. If you want to collect only airmail stamps from countries that no longer exist, there will be dealers who can find you the material.
-
Step 2
A low-cost starter collection is easy to begin. Even though people mail fewer and fewer items (and use more online and metered postage), used stamps on the secondary market can often be bought by the box lot or in bulk, if you don’t mind duplicate material. A caveat: just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s valuable. Some stamps from the late 1800s still abound in quantity (the first U.S. stamps were issued in 1847) and are relatively inexpensive to find.
-
Step 3
Find a stamp buddy. Working with a stamp collection is a fun thing to do with a friend or relative on a snowy or rainy day. It’s fun to share in the discoveries in that mystery box lot that you bought together as well as to share the cost. Sorting a pile of foreign stamps into their respective countries can wile away the hours in a very peaceful way.
-
Step 4
Learn how to care for stamps. Handle them with tongs so oil from your fingers doesn’t get on them, especially mint (new) stamps. Soak used stamps off their paper, then dry them in a drying book. Be especially careful with stamps when they are wet, as they are fragile and tear easily. When dry, store them in stock books or display them in stamp albums using hinges. Never use tape. Mounts are for mint stamps that still have their glue (gum) on the back. Never lick them to place them in an album.
-
Step 5
Learn about errors and rarities and what makes one stamp rare while its cousin is worth just pennies. Sometimes it’s a printing color error or a different number of perforations per inch on the sides. Back when the sheets had to be fed through the press twice for two different colors, sometimes they would get put in upside down, and those inverted stamps would accidentally make it to the post offices and sold before anyone noticed the error. Inverts are often highly prized collectibles. Everyone’s heard of the 1918 24-cent Curtis Jenny air mail invert, even if they don’t know the finer details about it. “Oh, yeah, that upside-down plane stamp.” It’s an American icon.
-
Step 6
Learn about history and geography through stamps. Locate countries on a globe or world map and read about them. Notice how stamps of countries ruled by fierce dictators served as propaganda. Discover overprints, which often happens to the stamps of a country soon after being taken over by another. They’re often limited in supply and time period and can be rare and expensive, or if a country printed too many of them and they didn’t get used up during the occupation, they’re cheap for collectors nowadays.
-
Step 7
If you feel you’ve outgrown your stamp collection, just put it away on a shelf for a while. In a few years, you might go back to it again and discover why you liked looking at those little pieces of artwork in the first place. Stamp collecting is a hobby that is unlike many others. People outgrow dolls and trucks, can’t always play sports, lose interest in a craft or can no longer afford the boat or snowmobile and its upkeep. Young or old, stamps can entertain, and a collection can be affordable for any income bracket.
