Unconventional Stamp Collecting

I love postage stamps. They're little works of art. Since I use my fountain pens to correspond with people all over the world, I often find interesting stamps on the envelopes that land in my mail box.

I get frustrated with the usual albums made specifically for stamp collecting. There are lots of pictures of stamps where you're supposed to mount the real stamps that match the pictures. But I seldom have the stamps that are pictured so I have to mount my stamps in the blank spaces. I've decided to be unconventional and make use of a blank journal that I bought a few years ago.

This journal is perfect! The paper is acid-free and fountain pen friendly. The cover is a lovely collage of postage stamps and fountain pens. My plan is to soak the stamps off the envelope paper and mount them with stamp hinges on the journal pages. Beside each stamp I can make a notation, giving the date and telling whose letter the stamp came on. If there is something of unusual interest in the letter, maybe I'll make a note of that, too.

I've started with some stamps that I found in a box of my mother's papers. My mother was a prolific writer, and although she passed away almost nine years ago, I'm just now going through the boxes of letters, creative writing, and journals that she left.

So this journal that I'm starting will be a combination scrapbook and stamp album. And, since I'm using the approved stamp-collecting hinges, it will be easy to remove a stamp to sell if I ever find out one of them is worth ka-zillion dollars. I like to cover all the bases.