What do you do with your stamps ?

Now that you have collected your stamps and organize them into stamp albums, what else can you do with it. Some people just collect stamps for the sake of collecting stamps; some people do it to make a living buying and selling stamps, some people doing it to keep them occupied and there is also some people who like to get busy with their stamps and participating in the stamps exhibition.

The one which is rather complicated is the one if you are interested in participating on the stamps exhibition. I am not an expert on this subject, although I have participated on the stamp exhibition in the past. There are a lot of rules that you need to follow and time to spend making the preparation for the exhibition.

There are several organizations involve with the stamp exhibition. In general stamp exhibition is not a private exhibition, but it is organized by countries/government organization. The participants are postal services from various countries, stamps dealers, philatelic suppliers and last but not least stamps collectors. I have no interest on the other section of the exhibition, except the one which concern the stamps collectors. During the stamp exhibition, normally there is a collector competitions. This competition is divided into several different classes or groups which are outlined below:

1. Traditional - Philatelist who stamps based on country. This includes collecting all kinds of stamps, essays, proofs, watermarks, gum, errors and forgeries.
2. Postal history - gathering the postage material by tracing the postal history of a country through philatelic material. This includes collecting postal articles showing markings, postal routes, postal rates, development of postal system, automation of mail. disaster mail, maritime mail etc.
3. Postal stationery - the part of philately which deals with post cards, envelopes, covers, wrapper etc. The collection can include registration mail, acknowledgements, certificates of posting and telegraph mail. All the items has to be related to the post office or at least issued by the postal services.
4. Aero-philately - a branch of philatelist who collects aviation and airmail stamps, postal material carried or dropped from air, cancellations, rocket mail, balloon mail and pigeon mail. Basically any postage material that are processed through the air.
5. Thematic Philately - the branch of philately which are collecting stamps and other postage material related to a theme like birds, flowers, train etc.
6. Literature Philately - the study of literature on stamps like catalogues, research articles, handbooks, philatelic periodicals etc.
7. Fiscal Philately - a specialize branch which deal with revenue stamps and stamped documents which have been used to pay revenues or taxes.
8. Maximaphilly - the group which are collecting picture postcards showing the stamp design or a picture with some relation to the stamp on it.
9. Astrophilately - collecting stamps related to space, rocket mail, astronomy, history of space research etc. Very similar to Aero-philately, the dream of a man that one day we will have a postal service between the earth and the moon.
10. Mophila - collection of modern stamps restricted to last 15 years. The term of 15 years is relative since at one point of time, the object on mophila will become classic as well.
11. Social Philately - collection of postal articles describing the social history. The exhibit can contain upto 40% non philatelic material to supplement the exhibit.

Most people who collect stamps do not go through and participate on the stamp exhibition simply because it takes too much time and effort. However, there are benefits that you will get if you try to participate on the stamp exhibition. Being a passive stamp collector who only collect stamps does not pushed you to get more information about the stamps, whereas if you are participating in the exhibition, you need to know your stamps. In the process of getting to know your stamps, you will gain a lot of knowledge. If you want to become an investor in the stamps collecting, one of the best way to start is to become a collector who participate in the stamp exhibition.

The drawback of stamp exhibition is the cost of participating is not cheap. Specially if you are participating on the Postal History section. A single envelope with a special cancellation will cost you easily USD 1,000 and you need several of them for your collection. But please bear in mind as well that a good collection will worth more than all the item that make up the collection. There is an added value for your collection if you won a high level medal like vermeil or gold.

Winter in Canada

Saturday and Sunday 15 & 16 December 2007 were the first real snow that I have seen in my entire life. Well, the entire life I am talking about is the one in Canada. The snow started to fall around Saturday night.

The process of snowing that we had was what they called in Canada flurries, very light snow with a lot of wind. These flurries fell at the rate of around roughly 2 cms per hour and we have this for the next 18 hours. By mid day Sunday, we already have a pile of snow in our front yard as high as 30 cms.

My son start to shovel the snow around 11 a.m. to clear our drive-way so that our car can get out. Unfortunately with the rate of the flurries, it did not take very long to build up the barricade of snow again on my drive way.

By late afternoon, I have to shovel it again already and later on again around 22:00 p.m.

We have to do it late at night as well, because if the temperature is rising a few degrees and then drop again, we will have a solid ice on our driveway. This has happened in the past and it was quite impossible to clear up the driveway when that happened. So night or day, when you have piles of snow on your driveway, you have to get rid of it.

Monday come and luckily no snow. I always say that I like snow and cold temperature. I still like the cold, but snow is okay once in a while and not at the amount of what I have on Sunday.

It seems that after the wrath on Saturday dan Sunday last week, the weather has been relative nice to us. It is still cold, but cold is not a problem; at least for me.

School will also finish soon. This coming Friday is the last day for school this year. Holiday and celebration is the theme in the supermarket and shopping mall. Christmas decoration is something worth looking at, specially in downtown area.

Well, time to finish it and do something else.....

What do you collect as a philatelist - part 3

Some people prefer to collect rather unusual philatelic material. Included on these groups are the errors, the freak stamps, special overprint stamps and some material which can not be considered as philatelic material. The last material normally called cinderela.
I will go through each material to give an explanation of what they really mean.

Error or Freak Stamps
As the title implies, the material that are included on these category are the "wrong" material. There are various mistake on the philatelic material. The mistake could come from a misprint, but by accident the misprinted stamp is being used and sold through the post office.
The misprint could be in the form of wrong colour print, missing colour, shifted print, undetected damage on the printing plate, inverted picture, misperforate or imperforate stamps.
All the stamps with these mistakes should not have been sold or distributed in the market, but again the postal office is run by only human, and of course mistake does happen. So then this material is out in the market. It is a rather specialize material and not very easy to collect.

Overprinted Stamps
There are occasion where the post office decides that they want to re-issue some stamps with different value. There are various reason for this action, one is that they have too much unsold printed stamps of a certain theme. The other reason is the is a special celebration and the time to design a new stamps is too short. In the old days, these method of overprint is also used to change the value of the stamps, e.g. during the conversion of Indonesian currency in 1966 from Rp. 1,000 to Rp. 1.00. The stamps at that time was overprinted with a new value to reflect the changes of currency value.
There are also an overprinted process which is done to indicate that the stamp is a special stamps. A good example of this is the overprint "specimen" which normally only used on stamps that is given to the UPU (Universal Postage Union) for the sample of the issued stamps. Or the overprint "official" or "military" which indicates that the stamps in to be used only by a certain organization.
The overprint method is also used to change the country's name. A lot of these stamps existed during the end period of collonial time. There were some Indonesian stamps from 1940 to 1945 which are issued by using the old Dutch stamps with some overprint to indicate that the stamps are now belong to the Indonesian government.

Cinderela
Cinderela is not an official stamps. These are considered as toys, but imitating the form of stamps. Cinderela exist in the form of food coupon, promotional material from companies and a few other specialize situation.
Most of the time, people are collecting these stamps because of the picture in it which is very similar to the theme of their stamp collection. However, some of these cinderela can be very expensive because it is very scarce.