Hiya

Hi

I've just joined and as instructed I'm making an introductory post. I've been accumulating stamps for a few years and have recently tried to focus myself and study in more depth rather than just accumulate, and one strategy has been to buy a pair of old Ideal albums covering the foreign countries up to 1936 and starting to fill in the many empty spaces. It's been quite successful I think and I've found it very enjoyable and even managed to complete my first page. 

I'm particularly fascinated by the stamps of South America for reasons which aren't entirely clear to me - although the fact that you can get many of the stamps, even some of the  very early issues for very little might have something to do with it. I very much like the images on the stamps too, loads of portraits of people of historical importance to the country and some great images of other things too - Uruguay for example with it's focus on Llamas! The history of the area is so clearly reflected in the stamps too - all the overprints caused by the war between Chile and Peru. Totally fascinating

For similar reason I find the stamps of the Baltic states between the world wars very interesting too.

I'm also interested in many other countries though, I find I'm a bit of a magpie and there's something that sparks my interest in most stamps - the subject, the quality of the image, the history contained in tiny fragile fragments of paper are just some of the things that appeal to me and make me delve deeper into the stamps.

I have been very interested in reading and inspired by a couple of blogs about world wide collecting that you may already have come across, Big Blue and Filling Spaces. If you haven't I'd urge you to have a look, they're really fascinating and helpful, Big Blue has some very interesting information about the stamps of many countries, he's working through the alphabet and as I write this has reached the letter "P"

I find the railway parcel stamps of Belgium interesting and like many people I'm trying to collect examples of the cancellations for every station on the Belgian Railways. I also have a topical collection of railway related stamps and covers.

Typically I buy boxes of random stamps and it's surprising how much that fits somewhere into my interests turn up. I find the whole process of sorting through boxes and bundles of stamps very soothing and a pleasant diversion from work which can be quite stressful. Of course as time goes by the number of useful stamps in a random selection is reducing and I'm starting to be more selective in what I look at - I even put some bids in on an auction yesterday and I'm awaiting the results.

I've been going to local stamp fairs and found that very enjoyable, there is something vey pleasant about being amongst people interested in the same sort of things as you. Unfortunately the local stamp club meets on the same night that I'm already committed elsewhere so I've been unable to join or I would have for sure

I'm looking forward to following threads here and chatting to people across the world

All the best

Crispin