Advantage of World Wide Collecting

World wide collecting’s main advantage is the quantity of material that a collector needs for his collection. A specialist, even in an area as seemingly vast as United States stamps soon gets in the position where most of his collecting time is spent looking for material for the collection or working to obtain funds to afford the items that are needed for the collection. World wide collectors never can even approach completion and always have little groups of thousands of stamps that need sorting and evaluating before they can be placed in albums and stock books. It was this type of collecting that largely existed in the earlier years of philately and, even as our hobby changes to the more specialized one that it is today, until thirty or so years ago most collectors maintained a “for fun” world wide collection that was to them what a Jackie Chan movie is to a serious film person today. Earl Apfelbaum was always extolling the virtues of world wide collecting. He saw it as more educational than specialized philately, less expensive and more fun. Like many of the things of bygone eras, it lost out to newer, though not necessarily better, ways. Still on a day like today on the East coast where I live, with Hurricane Irene blowing outside and the rain pounding at the roof, the idea of having a bunch of old stamps from the four corners of the world to sort and identify seems like a pretty nice way to spend a few hours.