For the last seven days I’ve been on a business trip to Eastern & Northern parts of the Finland. As I’m writing this, I’m staying the weekend in Oulu, one of the northernmost and largest cities in Finland.

Though Oulu is one of the largest cities up north (even in global scale), it provides very few attractions for passing by stamp collectors. There are zero stamp shops; and most of the activity appears to occur within the local stamp club (which like most Finnish stamp clubs gets together on middle of week, right after the working hours).

I started my weekend by visiting Oulu’s public library. I was pleasantly surprised to see such a healthy selection of philatelic literature: catalogs (mostly Michel and Scandinavian catalogs like Facit, AFA, Norma and Lape; but some SG and Scott too), resource books and even some foreign stamp literature were available. The selection was way better than in most Finnish public libraries I’ve visited.

I spent about half an hour browsing the latest 2011 edition of Norma Finnish stamp catalog. As usual, the catalog values contained both small ups and downs. Catalogs foreword highlighted that the prices and demand for modern commemoratives (especially from booklets and m/s) has increased heavily. This is due to low supply of used modern commemoratives. Right now the market price for modern Finnish “commemoratives only” kiloware is extremely high (starting from about 200€/kg), and in most cases it’s available only in very small amounts… I guess this is a straight result of the fact, that the availability and use of commemoratives has decreased year after year.

My next stop was library’s magazine department. Once again I was very happy to find several stamp related magazines such as Filatelisti, Keräilyuutiset and AboPhil (all of Finnish origin); sadly there were zero international stamp magazines to be found.

All the magazines had entries about the upcoming Nordic stamp exhibition Nordia 2011 and how great it will be. If you haven’t heard of Nordia before, it’s “THE stamp event” amongst Scandinavian collectors. This year the exhibition will be housed pretty close to my home (=about 45 minutes drive), and I might visit the expo… The reason I say might are the ticket prices: 12 Euro’s per visitor. If taking my family with me to show, I will end up paying over 70 Euro’s (approx. 100 US$) for entrance fees only. And they wonder why families and youth are such a rare sight in stamp shows

The magazines had some interesting philatelic tidbits worth writing down… It seems that the Norwegian Post has started selling out of their old (mint) stamp stock. The practice is nothing new under the sun, but the Norwegian Post is selling issues from 19th century onwards I can only imagine how “happy” Norwegian stamp dealers must be of this unexpected competition.

For rest of my Saturday I spent shopping around. I did visit several used books stores, and though they had some random philatelic literature, I was quite shocked by price levels. No deals were done.

Till next time, happy collecting!

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