Collectors usually want three things in a philatelic specialty-aesthetic appeal, acquisition challenge and affordability. Each collector defines these terms differently. But we all want the stamps that we collect to be intrinsically attractive. We want our ability to obtain them to equal our interest in the philatelic hunt and we want the cost of the collecting to match our financial ability to afford the stamps. On these criteria there are few more interesting major countries to collect than the Netherlands. The Dutch have always been among the world’s most commercial nations and postal use throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has produced a large supply of material. The stamps are cleanly designed and well printed. And the country has had stable government and low inflation which kept postal rates the same for long periods of time, resulting in relatively few postal issues until about 1960. And Netherlands has the unusual characteristic (if collected by the Scott catalog) of having no rarities-really none. The most expensive stamps are the two 10 Guilder stamps of the 1890-1903 period and they sell for about $500 each. The entire country can be collected for about $2500 used (to 1960) and about $10000 mint which is a fraction of what it would cost to complete United States Stamps( probably over $2 million). There are only a few hundred different stamps in this period and even though the prices are not very high, Netherlands stamps are popular and nice copies of many stamps are challenging to find. When your collection of Canada gets hung up on not being able to afford the 12 Penny or your France on the Prussian Blue, perhaps you will want to refresh yourself on a country whose collecting offers so much for so little.
