Stamp Collection Care

How to look after your stamp collection

Putting the interesting historical side of stamp collecting aside and here’s how to take care of your collection for yourself. First you should buy a quality neat album. A small one will suffice at the beginning if you’re new to stamp collecting, and nowadays good stamp albums can be purchased for very little. Next you need some stamp mounts or ‘stamp hinges’, in order to fix your treasures in their places within the album. Never paste, glue or gum a stamp in your book: you spoil the stamp for ever. The mounts are small oblong pieces of gummed paper. You take one, bend it over to form a hinge, gummed side outwards, and after attaching one half to the upper part of the back of your stamp, fix the other half of the hinge in your album. The stamp is thus undamaged and can easily be removed when required.

Handling Stamps

You should handle good stamps with. tweezers, which can be bought cheaply. Handling stamps with hot or greasy fingers soils them, and their value is gone, as well as their beauty. And they are beautiful. Almost every stamp is a marvellous miniature picture, and nowadays more than ever are there wonderful engravings of historical, natural and topical interest. A glance at our stamp pages of pictures and sales will prove this. Truly the art of the stamp designer is marvellously well developed.

You can buy your stamps in packets, but after a time you will want to go to your stamp dealers and look over their specimen books and approval sheets. There you may buy stamps single, and complete your sets.