By Larry Crain
As I travel to Northern California stamp shows (including Reno and Southern Oregon), dealers ask what I collect or what I’m looking for. They never ask why. Well, the answer is obvious: I collect because it is fun. Now there are other reasons too, but let me concentrate on the fun.
If we started as kids, everything was fun, but even among the fun stamps we collected there were favorites — maybe the multi-colored animals of the Mozambique Company or the big, different shapes of Tanna Tuva or a special stamp or set given to us by the person who got us started.
As kids and adults, we found special countries or topics that we gathered especially. Maybe we decided to exhibit, and if so, these special interests led to exhibiting, or maybe we decided to exhibit first and then looked at our collection to see what we had to exhibit. In either case these early countries or topics became often our “serious” collecting interests.
But . . . we still collected for fun. We buy stamps or covers because they appear to us intriguing. They come probably from some other aspect of our lives. We collect where we live or where we have lived. We may collect our job or a job that was considered earlier in our lives but never happened. We collect what we do outside of work and philately; maybe these are collections related to sports, tv, movies, vacations, etc. We sometimes buy items only because they are neat, unusual or pretty. We all have a gallimaufry of philatelic items (gallimaufry – a collection of things, a word I learned from a stamp exhibit in Eureka.)
As I have gained friends from the philatelic area of the Nor Cal Council (Fresno to Medford, San Rafael to Reno), I try to ask what else people collect. And I hear great stories of their fun collections, what they also have passion for but don’t usually get a chance to share with others.
Stamp collecting is FUN! and it is fun to share it with others.