Looks like May is a lousy month for my blogging. I took a vacation last week to the Houston, TX area. I had planned on visiting the 2 stamp stores I found online to see if they had anything of interest. However, neither dealer I e-mailed responded, so I ended up not going to the stores. However, I have been tracking E-bay, and making a handful of purchases, the most significant of these being a set of all 26 plate blocks of C1-6.
Other than that, I bought a small set of the 1.00 Town Emblem plate blocks with different dates, a tabbed FDC for the 1952 Tel Aviv issue, and a 10ag over 32ag accounting tax revenue. Another half dozen or so items off the want list. Only a few thousand to go. If I can ever finish inventorying my plate block collection, I will be able to go through my post office openings collection and really knock the want list down.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Long time, no post
It has been a while since my last post. For the most part, this is because I haven't had much time to work on stamps. I still check E-bay for new items, but in the last few weeks, I have made only 1 purchase, and that was for an $0.80 sheet of blank Massad stamps. I know the seller probably got it for free at the post office (when I was in Israel in 1999, I was able to get one from the clerk for free), but I couldn't resist it for $0.80.
I have been reading on the Virtual Stamp Club message board about the large drop in APS membership recently (over 4,000, nearly 8% of all members). I used to be an APS member, but dropped my membership years ago. I really saw no benefit of staying a member. I didn't use the sales circuits, and the American Philatelist magazine never had any articles that interested me. The magazine was geared to people who would think nothing of spending a few thousand dollars on a stamp, not to the average collector.
This is similar to the reason that I stopped subscribing to Linns. I would read the weekly magazine in under 10 minutes. I guess if my collection was Great Britain or US stamps, it would be more relevant, but the vast majority of the time, there was nothing for an Israel collector. When I let my subscription lapse, they sent a letter saying how the hobby had lost another collector. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am still actively collecting, I just find that I can do so without paying for a Linn's subscription.
How can stamp collecting grow? My best guess would be to capture the average collector. Rather than targeting only the high end, someone should be targeting the 95% of the collecting population that sees buying a one hundred dollar stamp as out of there price range. In my previous blogs, I posted about a lot of items that are harder to find, but the vast majority of them can be found for under $100. I can't recall every spending more than a few hundred dollars for a set of stamps (Doar Ivri tabs, First Airmails), most of the time, I buy items for $5-10 each. I think that is what the vast majority of collectors do as well.
I have been reading on the Virtual Stamp Club message board about the large drop in APS membership recently (over 4,000, nearly 8% of all members). I used to be an APS member, but dropped my membership years ago. I really saw no benefit of staying a member. I didn't use the sales circuits, and the American Philatelist magazine never had any articles that interested me. The magazine was geared to people who would think nothing of spending a few thousand dollars on a stamp, not to the average collector.
This is similar to the reason that I stopped subscribing to Linns. I would read the weekly magazine in under 10 minutes. I guess if my collection was Great Britain or US stamps, it would be more relevant, but the vast majority of the time, there was nothing for an Israel collector. When I let my subscription lapse, they sent a letter saying how the hobby had lost another collector. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am still actively collecting, I just find that I can do so without paying for a Linn's subscription.
How can stamp collecting grow? My best guess would be to capture the average collector. Rather than targeting only the high end, someone should be targeting the 95% of the collecting population that sees buying a one hundred dollar stamp as out of there price range. In my previous blogs, I posted about a lot of items that are harder to find, but the vast majority of them can be found for under $100. I can't recall every spending more than a few hundred dollars for a set of stamps (Doar Ivri tabs, First Airmails), most of the time, I buy items for $5-10 each. I think that is what the vast majority of collectors do as well.
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