happy to hear I’ve been found ‘guilty’ on bringing back the stamp bug in your life

Do you show your collection to others?

Very rarely these days; mainly because the collection has grown so “big” (120 stock books or so) and it’s located in ‘non-public’ parts of our home… Usually it’s just me & my misses going through the albums. The kids want to join in the fun sometimes. Some collectors and family have seen small parts of it too.

If so, what stories do you tell while showing your collection?

Usually me and misses discuss about the topics on stamps, or places/countries…Non-collectors usually amaze about the number of stamps, the shapes, countries etc.

Do you keep notes about the stamps in your stockbook above and beyond the inventory side of things? If so, can you show a picture of that?

Rarely… The main is reason like you say: it makes the collection look clumsy easily… The further I’ve gone with the art of building/maintaining a collection, the more determined I am that stockbooks are perfect for storage & inventory purposes. But for public display purposes it has to be something else (like these digital album pages I’ve built – likely I’ll make a photobook out of these once I have every space filled).

I agree with what you’ve written re: stockbooks but I still have this issue that my collection should look pretty and tell a bit of a story when non-collectors view it. So I build my own pages, slowly. They may not look much different than the Steiner pages but the descriptions tell a bit more about the purpose of the stamp.

My struggle with using stockbooks is that I am forever adding slips of paper with catalogue numbers, etc. Which can get messy.

So two questions — hopefully for further posts!

Do you show your collection to others? If so, what stories do you tell while showing your collection?

Do you keep notes about the stamps in your stockbook above and beyond the inventory side of things? If so, can you show a picture of that?

Thanks again for everything you have shared on the blog and in the comments!

Mark

There is a stamp museum near my house (about 5 minutes drive)
http://www.spellman.org. They have some good collections on display as well as a store. They also have these big boxes filled with off-paper stamps for 2c each. I spend an hour every other weekend there finding some nice stamps:)

Re, swap material… I responded this at About me topic where you initially placed the question.