Stamp Collection Care

Just like stamp collection requires a lot of time similarly taking good care of those stamps is vitally important. Stamp Collection involves a schematic arrangement of the collected stamps and preserving their quality. Stamps having poor quality won’t make a good impression on anyone looking at your stamp collection efforts.

Soaking Stamps

At times you receive a stamp pasted on an envelope. You might have to get rid of the envelope to add that stamp to your collection. Tearing it out would mean loss of quality and possible damage to the stamp. Before separating the stamp from its cover evaluate its worth with and without the cover. At times old stamps with covers are worth more than those without the cover as they have interesting details of postal history. You could refer your query to your stamp club mates to decide if you need to keep the cover or no.

Once you have made up your mind to separate the stamp from its cover, cut finely around the stamp close enough to keep the teeth around the edges intact. Then soak this stamp cut out in lukewarm water, spread in a saucer. Allow the paper to float till the stamp is separated from the paper. You may rub off the remaining adhesive at the backside of the stamp with your fingertips. Now you need to dry these stamps using either a newspaper or an absorbent paper. Once these stamps dry they develop wrinkles on them, which could be removed by placing them between the pages or beneath a heavy book.

Stamp Collection Album

Arranging your stamps is an important part of stamp collection. This ensures better quality and gives more life to your stamp collection, when preserved in an appropriate manner. There are different ways to store stamps. Easiest would be to sort stamps and put them in separate envelopes. Envelopes are available in different sizes and ones having a transparent portion called as the glassine envelopes would be preferred by stamp collectors as the stamps are visible through it. This would be the most basic way to store your stamps. If you want to store your stamps for a higher durability you could make use of stock books. Stock books or folders have a set of transparent pockets where in stamps could be arranged depending upon their sorting. This ensures durability but not a very good presentation of your stamp collection as the stamps are in groups. Individual stamps cannot be viewed.

Making a Stamp album for your collection would be the ultimate way to preserve your hard earned stamps. You could design your own stamp album by punching a set of handmade paper together either with a ribbon or getting it spiral bounded. Choose a good color for the paper on to which stamps would be prominently visible. You may choose to stick stamps on either side of this paper or just on the right hand side, making use of special peel able gum that will not harm stamps.

Another option would be to purchase a ready made album having printed information that would help to sort stamps into different subjects. This seems to be a good initiative for budding stamp collectors. The only trouble here is that a readymade album restricts any kind of creative presentation to preserve stamps. When you create your own stamp album you could add on as many more supplement s as you wish to. Moreover you could design various sections within your album such as Sort by type – animals, ships, nations, country, etc. You may add a separate section for covers. Used and unused/mint stamps could have separate pages allotted too. Remember to make use of stamp mounts while you stick mint stamps to your album. This will help to restore its quality and preserving the adhesive at the back of the stamp.