When Rose and I met back in 1968, I did not realize that we shared the hobby of Stamp Collecting. In fact, we were married at least a year before the topic ever can up. It turns out that Rose collected U.S. stampless covers and I was collecting U.S. classics and U.N.

Now, more than 27 years later, we are still avid stamp enthusiast and participate in stamp club meetings and exhibits in the Phoenix area. Over the last year, we have used our computer to make all of our own album pages. We use WordPerfect for the basic text editing, a 2400 dpi full color scanner by Artec, a 600 dpi HP5L laser printer and various photo composition packages for detail graphic work. We hope to start exhibiting again next year.

The center of our collection is U.S. classic. Our collection starts with early 19th century stampless covers, moves onto the 1940 one penny black (to demonstrate early postal history and what led to the creation of stamps in the U.S.) and then to the postmaster's provisional. We have created pages for each series of stamps, discussing the political and technical aspects of the issue through the end of the 19th century.

We are just starting on designing pages the EARLY 20TH CENTURY. Prior to that, we completed the pages for our U.S. Air Mail. In order to build up our collection, Rose and I worked with many other collectors during the 70's and 80's. We helped them catalogue their collection and traded their extras for ours. Some elderly collectors wanted to step away form the hobby, and had no one in their family to leave their collection to. In the cases that we could not afford to pay fair value for all or some of their collection, we worked with other clubs and agencies to ensure that they received fair value for their lives' work.

Our United Nations collection is complete as is our U.S. Air Mail. Like many of you, we can not afford the current market prices of many stamps we would like to add to our collection. Instead of purchasing new stamps, we trade with other stamp club members and work at finding new ways to create specialized album pages for exhibiting. We have also found locations on the Internet where many affordable deals can be found. For instance, Joseph Luft's home page is an excellent source of low priced material and a jump off point to many research areas on philately.

If you have any questions or suggestions on creating personalized exhibit pages, sources of material or research information please send me a message.