It seems that many of us do not feel complete unless we are collecting something. Some people collect coins, others stamps, others knives and so on. Perfectly worthless things become objects of desire to collectors and thus become valuable. Bits of damaged paper become extremely valuable because there is only one or two of these stamps in the world. An old baseball card becomes very valuable because it is hard to get and becomes wanted by many collectors. There is almost nothing that is collected by someone. The funny thing is that almost all of us, even though we may not be overt collectors, hang on to some items. I myself am guilty of this. I am not really a collector because I do not keep up any collections, but I do have a couple of items that would be considered collectable. For instance I have the first Hallmark ornament of the Enterprise which now has a value of around $300.00 along with a few other Star Trek items. The Enterprise ornament is just a piece of plastic as are the other Star Trek ornaments but it was produced in less numbers wetting the appetite of Star Trek collectors everywhere. I guess there just wasn't enough of them to get around. It is also very important to have the original box and packing because this makes it even more valuable. Silly isn't it?

Gibraltar Stamp, no enlargement available
Photo Source: With Permission (c) www.gibraltar.gov.uk

Moving on to the world of stamps reminds me of my childhood. Almost every child, when I was young, got a stamp album and a one or two dollar packet of stamps which contained about 500 stamps for each dollar. Of course these stamps weren't worth anything, but it was fun to paste them into the album after finding the picture of them on the correct page. It wasn't till I was about nine years old that I realized that you weren't supposed to paste them in the album, you were supposed to purchase something called a hinge which is nothing more than a small transparent tab with a special adhesive on it that will allow you to peel the stamp off of it without any damage. Again I had more to learn. I had to learn that mint stamps required a different setup. A mint stamp is just a stamp that hasn't been used yet. When a mint stamp is attached to a page it must be inserted into a device that looks like a clear plastic sleeve to protect it. The sleeve is then attached to the page with the hinge, or if it has its own special peelable adhesive, then it is attached this way. Now I was at the point where I knew two valuable facts on caring for my stamps.

But there are stamps that look alike but one may be rare while the other worthless, how could one tell? It turned out that the perforations on the edges of the stamps sometimes are different sizes. By measuring these perforations with a perforation gage you could sometimes tell the difference if nothing else came into play. Sometimes there are different water marks on the paper on which stamps were printed. To find the watermark you need a watermark detector and fluid. The watermark detector is nothing more than a black glass tray. You put the stamp face down in the tray and put the fluid on it. The watermark would usually be able to be read at that point. Some stamps are not so ready to give up their secrets. Over the years the colors of stamps would fade causing some stamps that were not valuable to look like stamps that were. A color gage is helpful, but is not always easy to use. I remember spending hours trying to figure out the colors of certain old stamps.

My stamp collection grew and grew but I really didn't have much of value, but I did have boxes and boxes of junk. This is the same junk that most people have that collect stamps. The same junk that they think might be valuable. My collection was comprised of stamps of the entire world. As I went along collecting I realized that this was just too much to handle, so I decided to specialize in Britain and the colonies. I guess this was a strange thing for an American collector to do. I became pretty good at valuating stamps and people started asking me to examine their collections. Unfortunately when someone I knew died that had any type of collection their widows would ask me to look at the collection. I had the unpleasant duty of having to tell most of them that the collection wasn't worth anything but they might want to consider donating it to charity. I became a small mail order dealer but I got tired of this after about a year and a half.

I now was in my mid thirties and had been collecting stamps for over 27 years. I had a pretty good collection but just couldn't keep up with it due to family concerns and expenses. I knew that the stamps I didn't have, I would never have due to their prices so I decided to give up stamp collecting. I auctioned off my collection in Britain, I figured it would get the most money there since it was a British collection, and have never looked back.