Avoid discarding stamps you need

What part of your collection are you throwing away?

That could be selling, giving, donating or just trashing, because you have too many. There are, of course, stamps that come along on occasion that you just stash in a folder or stock book, never to be seen for a long time. These little gems are eventually mixed in with all the other extras that you have gathered. Unless you are meticulous and check each of these against your collection, they can fall into the discard pile.

My practice has been to do my year collection as soon as album pages permit. My mint goes on one side and any used that I can find goes on the opposite page. That makes it neat and tidy. Then throughout the year and so on, as letters appear with nice stamps to save, after removing them from the letters, they end up in my stock book. After a while when that accumulation exceeds capacity, they are sorted into a book with that part of the collection.

So, recently I was looking at my collection and noted the stamps that were missing in relation to the ones I had marked, making sure that aspect was correct. Then I looked at my extras in the stock book and noticed the odd stamp which I hadn’t seen in my collection. Sure enough, there were several stamps from a year or two ago which I had missed. I might have put them in the club raffle or in a bag for our spring auction in May.

Luckily I avoided losing them, but that’s just how easy it can be to give away a part of your collection if you are not diligent.