Topical Stamp Collecting
Beginning Your Collection

Completeness

Perhaps the most difficult decision for you is whether to include every stamp issue related to your topic in your collection

• Coupled with that is the question as to just what is “every stamp issued related to your topic?”

Concerns, particularly following World War II when countries began seeing stamp new issues as a national source of revenue, led to the ATA urging its members in 1962 to refrain from purchasing inflated, speculative, and unnecessary issues.

• In 1995, ATA asked its members if they believed topical collectors were being exploited.
• Responses were varied
• Some urged that national and international topical/thematic organizations pressure stamp catalog publishers to black-list speculative issues. Such a program was conducted by the American Philatelic Society in the ‘60s and ‘70s and it died a quiet death
• Others concluded that if a collector does not purchase the speculative issues, the collector has not been exploited … or, in more pointed language, “Don’t tell me what to or not to collect!”

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