Stamp Collecting for Beginners: Tools and First Steps

The first decision is what to collect, and it matters more than any purchase. Trying to collect every stamp ever issued means owning a large pile of common material and never finishing anything.

Workable starting points are a single country, a single decade, a single subject such as ships, birds, bridges or space, or a single postal category such as airmail or special delivery. The American Philatelic Society's position is blunt and useful: there is no right or wrong way to collect, so choose the thing you actually find interesting.

A narrow subject also makes you better at the hobby faster, because you start recognising the issues, the printings and the fakes within your own patch instead of seeing everything as an undifferentiated heap.

Five items cover almost everything a beginner needs, and the UK auctioneer Warwick & Warwick puts realistic prices on them.

• Stamp tongs, about £10 for a spade-end pair. Skin oils mark stamps, and fingers crease them. Tongs are not tweezers: tweezers have grooved tips that cut paper.
• A x10 magnifier, about £20. Enough to read plate flaws, check perforation tips and see whether a line is engraved or printed.
• A perforation gauge. Two stamps with identical designs are often different catalogue numbers separated only by the number of perforation holes in two centimetres.
• Watermark detector fluid and a black tray, about £10. Use it in a ventilated room. Many watermarks are invisible until the stamp is face down in fluid.
• An album, from about £5 for a loose-leaf ring binder. Buy the cheap one first and the expensive one when you know what you are collecting.

Add hinges for used stamps and mounts for mint stamps. Hinges are cheap folded strips that peel off cleanly; mounts are clear sleeves that never touch the gum. Never use tape or glue — the APS is explicit that the damage is permanent.

Never pull a stamp off an envelope dry. Cut around the stamp leaving a margin of paper, then soak it.

The American Philatelic Society's method: separate brightly coloured envelopes first so the dye does not run onto other stamps, use lukewarm water in a shallow bowl and never hot water, let the stamps float free by themselves rather than pulling them, rinse gently, and dry overnight between paper towels. Warwick & Warwick add two practical points: handle wet stamps with your fingers, not tongs, because wet paper tears under metal, and never dry stamps with a heat source.

Two warnings matter. Many US self-adhesive stamps issued in 2004 or later will not soak off at all, and forcing them destroys them; leave those on a trimmed piece of paper. And some inks are water-soluble, so watch the water for colour and lift the stamp out immediately if it starts to bleed.

One rule overrides all of this: do not soak anything old or unusual. A nineteenth-century stamp is usually worth more on its envelope than off it. If the cover looks early, has an unusual destination, or carries a handstamp instead of a printed stamp, leave it alone and ask first.

Once stamps are dry, sort them the way you decided to collect: by country, by topic, or by postal service. Keep duplicates — they are what you trade with. Discard genuinely damaged common stamps rather than filling an album with them, but keep anything damaged that might be scarce until you know.

Unsorted stamps belong in glassine envelopes, the semi-translucent paper sleeves sold for the purpose. Ordinary paper and plastic food bags both cause problems: plastic can trap moisture against the stamp and some plastics leach chemicals over years.

Storage conditions do more damage than handling over time. Keep albums upright and away from damp, direct sunlight and heat. Sunlight fades inks and turns paper brown, and humidity makes mint stamps stick to whatever they are touching. Our guide to storing and caring for stamps goes into detail.

Free sources first: your own incoming mail, family correspondence, and anyone at work who gets overseas post. After that, dealers sell mixed packets and kiloware — bulk unsorted stamps on paper, sold by weight — which is the cheapest way to get volume to practise on.

A catalogue is the reference that turns a picture into a number. In the United States and Canada that is the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue; in Britain it is Stanley Gibbons. A catalogue listing gives the year, design, colour, perforation, watermark and a value for used and unused examples. The Scott catalog numbers page explains how to read one.

Joining a local club or a national society puts you next to people who can identify things in seconds that would take you an evening, and most of them are pleased to be asked.

Photograph a stamp and the app identifies it, which is a fast way to get the country and issue before you go looking for it in a catalogue.