What is a Stamp Collection?
Many years ago, a young man from a prominent family was working on his Eagle Badge for the Boy Scouts, and wanted to add a merit badge for stamp collecting. He bought a large number of stamps, put them into a stock book, and proudly went off to the home of the Merit Badge counsellor for approval. He was dismayed when the counsellor refused to sign the document that he had met the requirements for the merit badge. Unfortunately, he'd failed to understand one of the main tenets of collecting: It's not enough just to have a lot of like objects, but the objects have to be organized!
Museum curators know the reason their holdings is a collection rather than just an assortment of old items is that each item is carefully identified, catalogued, usually inventoried, and studied. The value of an item in a museum's collection increases significantly if the item can be properly placed in time, location, or ownership. Identifying an item as having belonged to a famous person makes it more valuable than one belonging to someone who is relatively unknown, because it adds understanding of the person who owned it, as well as itself. A display that shows the progression in the development of something, such as a deck of cards, increases understanding of how things change over time. Museum curators arrange displays to facilitate understanding. The same process can be applied to any collection, including a stamp collection.
Many stamp collectors arrange their collections according to the type of storage they use for those collections. Most collections are housed in commercially-manufactured albums, and the collectors arrange their collection - in fact, frequently limit their collections - according to the arrangement of the particular stamp album they use. Others make their own album pages, and arrange their stamps in a way that pleases them. This type of collecting is becoming extremely popular with the advent of modern personal computers, which allow greater flexibility in page layout and design! All of these collections have a few things in common: someone took a great deal of time and trouble to find out what material was available, and determined how to organize that material in a way to express a central theme.
For most worldwide stamp albums, stamps are arranged according to the issuing country, and then usually chronologically, for either all of the stamps issued, or for each group by type, within each country. People who collect stamps representing a single theme or function are called "topical collectors", and their theme is referred to as a "topic". Such people may arrange the individual stamps within a topic by sub-topics. For instance, a collector of birds on stamps may break down their collection by species, or group them by the type of habitat they live in, the area they're natural to, or divide them by some other grouping. Such a display is much more interesting and informative than one that has the stamps arranged haphazardly, with no identifiable characteristics.
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