Wonderful Albums-Cheap Price

There is an unfortunate hobby arc that goes like this. A wealthy person decides that he wishes to be an enthusiast, buys an enormous amount of gear, and loses interest before he has gotten any of the real enjoyment out of his new whim. This is the fly fisher who has all the latest Orvis gear or the guy with the 120″ projector screen in a private home. In philately, this shows itself in the new collector who buys a large set of very beautiful and expensive matched hingeless specialty albums, fills them with thousands of the mostly more basic stamps and loses interest in our hobby before all the real fun begins. For the great pleasure of philately is the chase, searching for difficult to find material and slowly creating a fine collection from which you learn and derive joy. But these ephemeral collectors provide a benefit for other collectors in the sense that plankton provides a benefit for whales. They create a constant stream of fine, barely used specialty album collections that come on the market and which collectors who are entering philately or expanding their scope within the hobby can purchase, often for little more than the value of the stamps that are in them. Thousands of dollars worth of albums are sold in this way for a fraction of their original retail price. We have such a group in our current Buy It Now sale. Do you like Russia (2457) or France (1459) or Germany (1558) or the United States (733)?