The Stamp Collecting How To Guide

How to start?, getting the stamps, cutting them and removing from envelopes.

Stamp collecting is a flexible hobby; you decide how much money and time you want to dedicate. You pick your topics and/or countries and you can learn a lot about different cultures.
Stamp collecting can be very rewarding and educating. It can open gates to other parts of the world and expose you to a whole new world of history, nature, culture and much more.
To get started, you can purchase bulk boxes of stamps from a dealer or a stamp collector selling stamps. Good places to look into are e-Bay, local dealers and online stamp stores. You can even buy bulk stamps by the pound or get them for Free!

Tell everyone you know to save stamps from their mail for you, especially friends and relatives from abroad. Ask anyone you know whose visiting abroad to bring back stamps for you.
You can contact other stamps collectors and swap stamps with them. Also, ask older family members if they kept any old letters or have an old stamp collection they would like to pass on. You will be amazed to find out that stamp collecting was very popular and almost every household had at least one collector.

Now that you have all those stamps, it's best to sort them by topics or countries. You should do this while the stamps are still on the paper because once you take them off the paper they become very delicate and can crease or bend. To remove the stamps from the paper do the following: get a clean shallow bowl and half fill it with lukewarm clean water and soak the stamps in it for 15 minutes. You should be able to peel off the stamp pretty easy at this point. Once the stamp is off the paper soak it again for a minute to clean it. Lay the stamps to dry on paper towel. Once they are dry it's time to place them in a nice album for display.

In our next post we will discuss the display of stamps and affixing them to albums. Check us back soon!