Continuing with the theme of "stamps," I wanted to get into a little further exploration of why stamps are such interesting and "accessible" collectibles.
Of course, the following are just my personal reasons and you might have different reasons!
Learning About Other Cultures
If we stop and think about why and when countries have issued stamps, it's often to commemorate important people or events in that culture. Perhaps this is not as true in 2025 — where "keeping collectors happy" has become part of the picture — as it was when I was a kid, but the result is that stamps are effectively "tiny snapshots" of the history and culture of all the world's countries.
As such, they are an awesome source of learning, but without having to pore over dull textbooks or encyclopedias.
This was certainly part of my dad's motivation behind starting me on stamp collecting, when I was little. And — in fact — a lot of my relatively good knowledge of geography and world history was derived from my stamp collection.
And whenever a new stamp would show up in the mail, we'd have to look up where it had come from, in the big world atlas.
Accessibility
Granted, we use email and online bill-pay a lot more nowadays, but people do still send letters and greeting cards and such.
Meaning... that postage stamps are one of the few types of colletibles that show up in the mail, absolutely free.
When I was a kid, I managed to build a collection of stamps that numbered in the thousands by no means other than getting stamps from our own mail, from my dad's office mail, and from asking other family members to save the stamps for me.
Not a lot of collecting hobbies you can do that with!
Portability
We were always moving and travelled a lot when I was a kid.
Another neat thing about stamp collecting is that stamps are tiny and very light. A decent sized collection can be contained in an album/storage book no bigger than a standard ream of printer paper.
It's not until you start to scale up into specialization and multiple albums that things become heavier and bulkier. Even so, I'd venture that 95% of the world's stamp collections could be moved in something the size of a single book moving box (12x12x18 inches or 30x30x45cm).
At the other extreme of that, when you get into really rare stamps, you can bring tens of thousands of dollars worth of old stamps with you in something no bigger than your average wallet!
Longevity
Stamps have been around a long time!
The world's first postage stamp was issued in England, in 1840. That means we have now had new stamps being issued continuously for 185 years!
The stamp pictured at right was issued by Spain, in 1851.
Will new stamps eventually disappear, as the world becomes more and more technologized? That's hard to say... some countries have stopped issuing new stamps; other places have entered a phase where parivate delivery services have taken over from government run post offices to deliver domestic mail — my native Denmark comes to mind — while stamps for overseas use continue to be issued.
Regardless, if you consider that something on the order of 500,000 different stamps have been issued around the world since 1840, with each printed by the millions, there are likely still trillions of postage stamps in the world!
$$$ Value
I have left the issue of "stamps are valuable as the final point here, because it can be a source of much confusion and misinformation.
Yes, over the years a few stamps have sold for more than one million dollars, but they can be counted on a couple of hands.
Personally speaking, the two most expensive stamps I have sold (via eBay auctions) fetched US $3,100 and $2,021, respectively. Both were "only known examples" in a highly specialized area.
More typical, the stamp pictured at left is from my native Denmark, issued in 1857, and sold by me on eBay in 2020 for about $80. In my world, that constitutes a "rare" and "valuable" stamp.
The vast majority of the world's stamps likely have a "value" of about one cent each, were you to try to sell them.
Bottom line, collect because you enjoy it, not because you are hoping to get rich!
Treasure Hunting!
One of my personal favorite attributes of stamp collecting is the "treasure hunting" aspect!
I enjoy buying whole boxes of random stamps (usually from estate or attic sales) and slowly sifting through it all, in hopes of finding "treasure" to fill empty spaces in my collections.
Six bins containing en extremely large estate lot of stamps and stamp albums, which I got my hands on about three years back. Still sorting some of it out!
Sometimes I'll get lucky and find a $10-20 item in a flea market box and I can turn around and sell it on eBay and get enough to buy a new flea market box... so I ultimately end up never being out of pocket and instead breaking even in the long run.
And that's a pretty cool deal, all told.
And that's precisely what I am going to do next... because it is a cold, rainy and windy winter evening.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your day!
How about YOU? Have you ever collected stamps? Do you still collect? Do you have another collecting interest? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
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Created at 2025.02.15 17:20 PST
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