As I have already narrated in my blogs my hobby of Stamp Collection started more as of a compulsion than a hobby. Perhaps if I was not in the circumstances that I was in I would never have taken it on. My father who died quite suddenly in an accident had a huge collection which I had never taken interest in till then or for that matter till about 25 years later. After his demise we just stored all of it in 3 cupboards and just got on with our lives.

One thing was that we always knew how close this collection was to his heart and we never wanted to dispose it off just to any collector. Many of his collector friends offered to evaluate the collection and get us the best price, but we never found it in our hearts to have someone come close to it. Now I have children of my own and was wanting to remodel the house that we noticed the space being occupied by these stamps. This got me a bit interested in trying to find out the value of these. I tried talking to a lot of known collectors. Some were not interested and others just wanted to take it for a knocked down price. I was wanting to try and find out the actual value and maybe a way to document the entire collection.

What I have found out is that it is very difficult to get into and evaluate someone else' collection especially if he is not around. Stamp collecting is not like any other collections like coins, paintings or anything else. Coins will generally be collected and filed country wise, paintings collected by the painter wise, etc. The stamp collection will always have a personality - YOURS. Stamps can be collected country wise, interest wise, topic wise, any way on earth. I have seen collections on topics like women, women sitting, elephant in jungle, presidents, etc. I have even seen a collector collecting all the stamps issued worldwide in his year of birth.

What does this tell you ? Well you should know a collection before you can do anything with it. If you do not know the collection you will just have to rely on others to help you out. So I did the best thing. I started my own collection out of his. How ? Here is how.

Luckily I found a few empty stamp albums, hinges, flat tweezers and a magnifying glass. Believe me if you want to be a collector and love your stamps these are absolutely essential. You can find these at any stamp shop in your locality or the nearest post office can guide you to one. Choose a topic for your album have at least 3 or 4 to start with. These topics can change as you progress. In my case I started out with India as a topic but soon changed it to India - Post Independence. Now I also have an album started on Australia, UK & USA. I am wanting to start a collection on Aircraft on Stamps. Well I think the topic really depends on what you have available initially but once the interest develops that is the time that you really pick a topic of your choice. That is the time you really become a collector.