What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

I spent six hours rummaging through old postcards at the Vintage Paper Fair in San Francisco yesterday and only bought twelve. Among the postally used ones were two additions to my Esperanto topical collection: one mailed from Hungary to the U.S.A. in 1920 and one mailed within Czechoslovakia in 1924.

A couple days ago I finished mounting Greece and Spain from 1940 or so through 1959. I've laid out Belgium for the same and started preparation to print pages for Albania, Algeria, and Angola. I think after this I'm going to start looking to purchase a bunch of early U.S. classics.

I've laid out Albania, Algeria, and Angola (from 1940ish) through 1959 on Steiner pages. And since Bulgaria was in the same storage box, I decided to tackle 1956-1959 (for some reason I stopped at 1955 the last time I worked on Bulgaria). As I was going through my glassines, it was like "yuck, what a bunch of crappy stamps". Then I went to my old Scott International Part IV pages and it was so nice to see that I had significant coverage with everything MH and in really good condition. Not sure what I'm going to do with my parallel set of mostly CTO stamps for this time period.

I've been thinking of branching out a bit from my core collection since much of it is complete and finding new items is becoming harder and harder to find. So I decided to tackle the challenge of putting together a "stamp from every country" collection. So far I've spent two afternoons at my local dealer going through his low cost items. Basically cherry picking the easy stuff. The more I find out about collecting these items, the more challenging it becomes. But I plan to continue and with a little luck and many hours with my dealer and my laying out of pages, I'll have something I'll be proud of.

The stamp from every country approach is a good way to explore the world.

Been mounting my latest Hipstamp purchases of world stamps into my collection. A lot of the sellers include a list by year and/or Scott number so that makes it a little easier to find the year and page, and print it if needed. Into a good run of Japan at the moment.

Worked on getting Argentina out of stock books and into my album until I ran out of stamp mounts. On hold until the mount order arrives.

Robert

Have had difficulty over a long period of time finding an appropriate Argentina 695e as they are pretty scarce and often misidentified. Found a copy of 695 that appeared superficially to be the correct color expected for 695e and paid 25 cents for it. Upon arrival, I was able to confirm that the stamp is 695e, which catalogs $8 but more important, I filled a very difficult space in my collection.

Bought another Kallax book shelf at IKEA since I happened to be in New Jersey today. That makes 4 of the 2x4 cube size. Also ordered 500 sheets of 65lb creme card stock, printer ink, and another 1000 sheet protectors. I should be good for a while now.

Picked up some decent 3" binders and Vario 8s pages to store all of my extra PNC (plate number coil) duplicates in one place. Created some small labels to give a place for each different Scott number and plate number. Took a while finding all of the places I had pigeon-holed all the extra PNCs, but I think I've found them all and added them to the pages. Not sure if I'll keep them, sell them individually, or as one big lot but it's nice to finally have them in one place.

Today, I finished assimilating the first 78 years of five different collections of Nicaragua into Steiner pages (1862 - 1940). That is 115 pages.

Nicaragua is to me, a favorite stamp collecting country because of so many surcharges, additional surcharges, and overprinting, making it quite complicated (the more the merrier). Hence the 115 (1-sided) pages.

The next step is to consolidate the post-1940 postage to Global pages (with glassines!).

The final step is to create 1 or 2 pages to link Steiner-to-Global in the 1940 time.

today I bought stamps and mounts

I have been creating a plan of attack to try and complete the U.S. section (general issues) of 1947 version of the Scott International Part 1, plus some extra selected stamps, such as #2, #17, #36, #70, #71, #72 and others. I'm going for used stamps through the Washington and Franklin sets, but then starting with #537 will try for MH or better.

Finally managed to sort out my loose pre-decimal Australian stamps into stockbooks. Next is to sort the on-paper stuff, and see what random Australian stuff in old albums can be salvaged (see thread on 'taped' stamps).

Started tackling the move of stamps from stock books to albums. I have 17 stock books to go through, on number 2. Also, added stamps to my albums from recent APS circuit purchases and packet purchases.

Robert