There’s always a lot of talk in the hobby about recruiting new stamp collectors and I’ve never really had anyone that I could encourage. My kids, as I’ve said before, they were both born without the collector gene and they aren’t interested in collecting anything. Nobody else I know cares. It was only very recently that I finally found someone who showed a little interest and…
Well, read on and see why this isn’t turning out well.
I recently had an extended conversation with a couple of other philatelists and the subject was how we could get young kids interested in collecting stamps. A lot of things were suggested and eventually, the discussion rolled around to how we got involved, back in the day.
I told my story, but I admitted that my path in wasn’t one that anyone could ever follow today. It’s a shame but the world has changed to such a degree that people back when I got started, our stories can almost certainly never be repeated.
But I’ll pass it along anyhow, just in case anyone has any ideas.
There’s a sub over on Reddit called r/askastampcollector and the only thing it ever gets used for, virtually always in fact, is people just show up with stamps that they found or inherited or they were given, looking for a big paycheck.
It doesn’t work that way and a lot of them get positively upset when they receive the news that what they have is worthless, but honestly, can we just stop worrying about value when it comes to collectibles? You people are going about it all wrong!
Okay, maybe complain isn’t the right word, but there’s one thing that I’ve noticed in poking around there, the overwhelming majority of videos made about stamp collecting over on YouTube, they all tend to be aimed at, shall we say, the beginners?
So let’s talk about that, please.
I’ve been kind of bored lately and I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on stamps. A lot of them have been about kiloware, people getting big bags of used worldwide stamps and going through them and while I typically don’t collect like that, the overwhelming majority of my collections are mint, I figured heck, I haven’t done that for years so I went and bought a couple of packets online and I’m going to go through them, breaking it down as I go.
Relatively recently, I’ve come back to my first collecting love, stamps and I’ve noticed that every single time I’ve come back to it, and I do this every couple of years, I go looking for the nostalgia of a stamp newspaper of some sort.
Yet there’s really no way to go home again.
Now that I’m back to collecting stamps, and having a great time doing it, naturally, I looked over on YouTube for some channels that might be entertaining to watch. While I did find some, and I know there won’t be a ton, I noticed one thing about the overwhelming majority of them.
They all seem to be aimed at the uninitiated stamp collector.
