Anyone who was a Cub Scout or a Boy Scout in the 1950s and 1960s received a free monthly copy of Boys Life magazine delivered in the mail. The magazine was for boys 7-17 and offered light reading, projects and an array of stamp collecting ads. Companies like Jamestown and Kenmore and Mystic and H E Harris vied for your quarter, offering 100 triangles or old time monarchs along with a selection of approvals. There premium offered was a loss leader to get you to order the approvals, which were usually a couple of dollars worth of individually priced sets and singles with enticing write up. With a few selection you were offered a stamp album and then you were a real stamp collector.
Today, stamp professionals see hundreds of these old time collections, put together by children for a few bucks each and put away on the shelves (or worse, in the damp basement) when they grew tired of them after a few weeks. Most of the owners are the collectors themselves, now older men who realize that there can be no monetary value to anything that never had any monetary value. But occasionally, you get an heir who brings in “Dad’s old stamp collection” and is just stupefied that there is no value. Years ago our advice to people with these collections when they told us that no one had any interest in them and that they never expected that anyone would ever have any interest in them was to give them to charity. But we have been hard pressed to find any charity that wants them anymore. Perhaps one of our readers can suggest something?