Stamp Collecting future?

I just returned from a local stamp bourse. To be honest it looked more like a gathering of the AARP (Assoc. of Retired People). I feel safe to believe that the only person there under the age of 40 was a young girl who was obviously with her stamp dealer dad (wether she collects... only dad can know for sure).
It seems to me to be a sad view of our hobby, but there it is. It becomes more and more obvious as time goes on that the young generations are not the least bit interested in spite of all the gimmics, childish stamp subjects and advertising.
I've written it before that new collectors are probably more likely to be recruited from the older generations (about 40 years old and up). We are getting at that age to be more sedate and a hobby that fits into that is good. We have more money to spend on hobbies since we find the fads, fashions, & such less appealing. Lots of reasons really... older people are more interested in learning, using their minds, etc. They are quite likely looking for things that don't demand any more time than they are willing to give, relaxing, doesn't take up room, can be shared with spouse, as cheap or expensive as you want, can easily tie in topically with other interests, is a quiet pasttime and many other things.
Change the slogan to "Introduce a senior citizen to stamp collecting".
Young people just aren't interested.

Dave (just an opinion & I have many of them too)

Dave (still a lot of canadian in me, eh)

Small world. My folks and sister still live there. My dad was Frank Emanuel as well.

And I too have just returned from a bourse, at the last day of VANPEX 2003, sponsored by my stamp club, the British Columbia Philatelic Society. My experience was different than Dave's.

While certainly the majority of collectors, exhibitors and dealers were older than me (I'm 60), it wasn't a great majority. We had several young exhibitors, the youngest about 12, the others in their mid-20s. Some dealers are certainly younger than me, and while I saw few young people browsing at the bourse, there were certainly people younger than me there. The best item
I found was offered by a very knowledgeable dealer, Tom Watkins; I expect he's in his mid- to late 30s.

I think you are mostly correct. I think that there's even room to consider youthful stamp collecting to be an utterly different hobby than adult stamp collecting. I don't think it's necessarily a given that knowledgeable and mature stamp collectors can only be grown from youthful stamp collectors.
Typically, I collected stamps from about age 10 or 11 through 16 or 17, then gave it up until I was in my 40s. About 95% of what I know has come from my activities as an adult collector.

Perhaps my enthusiasm for stamps was sparked in my youth, but I suspect it could also have been sparked in my 40's or 50's. In fact, my primary interest now is not stamps but commercially and privately used covers, which were only introduced to me shortly about 15 years ago. Cover collecting, at many levels, has little to do with stamps per se. In fact, many of my covers are free-franked, or were franked with stamps of minimal interest. Anyway,
I'd like to revise Dave's revised slogan to, "Introduce an adult to stamp collecting".

Looking amongst the myriad of early stamp magazines from 60's 70's, children were always involved, and there were many contests for them to adjust to their focus level.
I do not see this in modern magazines very much.

My son is bewildered by my interest in the little pieces of paper and shows no interest at all.
I feel I have sowed the seed though, and when the right time comes along
I am sure he will discover a need to investigate too.

I seem to notice most serious collectors, had a dibble in their youth and then came back for a re visit later.

Victors page on Ayn Rand is a classic example, and for me, her description of the motives behind the hobby describes my journey to a tee.

Well... at least I got a discussion going without insulting remarks about politicians, references to SNA, etc.
True, one bourse does not show the whole picture, but on a rainy day with not much else to do (least of all outside), it does cast a bit of an impression. In these bourses every 3 months or so I seldom ever see a child.
I can see in my own house my son's interests in any of my hobbies and interests. When I'm gone here's what I expect some of my interests to be done with by him:
Stamps: sell
Model trains: sell
Transportation photos: sell or dump in trash (wouldn't put it past him)
Genealogy: trash
Music: he'll keep the CDs of 1970s & later
Tools: they'll rust in the celler
Gardening: weeds
Computer: keep it (especially if better than his)
Coins: spend or sell (who knows)
Everything else: yard sale!
Maybe things will change by the time he's 40 or so. Maybe it is a matter as another pointed out that such hobbies as collecting now come when we are more settled and secure in life. To those of us who grew up in the
50s and 60s, stamp collecting was sort of waht the computer is today... a window on the world. I sure knew about Viet Nam before the Marines invited me to join them there. I have to wonder how many soldiers today knew where
Iraq was before they were sent over there.

<snip my previous comments>

Another Vancouver-area stamp club is the 21 Club, which has been around for years.

The "21" means that the membership limit is 21, although I am also told that this rule has been broken on occasion.

You have to be invited to join, and among those who are never invited are women. When a well-respected female collector tried to join, and was rejected, one of their own members quit in disgust.

Curiously, some of their members are also very active members of my own stamp club, but I fail to understand why any thinking person today can support a club which is so obviously out of step with the times. I guess old-cronyism has always been with us and always will.

Unknown, and had Daniel not been out of town with his paternal father,
I'd have invited him to the show with me. I was pleased to see the younger kids at the show so some are being groomed so to speak. I've not seen any youth at our clubs ntgs, but then I'm new and have only been to 2 of them. Of the other 2 clubs, I'm told one is in a Sr Center and they don't allow people under 55 so no kids go there - kindas dumb but thats their rule. I'm told it has a very active membership too.
The other is new and just forming, plus looking for a place to meet, probable Sr Ctr but they are looking at whether the 55 rule would apply for them too as some of the new mwmbers are under 55, let alone kids attending.

If you're trying to avoid attention, be careful that you aren't seen reading articles about beer, wine, alcohol or grapes on stamps!

You might want to make the offer to a local weekly paper.
They pay little but you can get in more easily.
Guess what... research shows they are read and read more than the big daily papers.

I don't know what your countries do, but the schools here do not teach geography or history except as an optional subject.

These are two subjects that stamps can teach well.

Can this be one of the reasons?

<snip>

Interesting! Someone here took a lesson from you guys. Just a month ago our State Education Directors job (elected position) was voted out by the Sheeple and will become an 'appointed' position by our esteemed emperor(dunce) Governor (Bill Richardson) as a cabinet level position.
He'll control the states education now - yeah, right!

I wonder if he'll have a stamp created in his honor?

We just had a stamp show this weekend and I attended both days for several hours. There was a table set up for kids to take all they wanted free from a large box of paper-on stamps, and all told I saw maybe 15-20 kids rooting around in there for quite awhile. I noticed several more were at various tables looking at stamps. Both of the kids
I happened to chat with briefly were looking for bird themed stamps.
Admittedly the 'Cast from Cocoon' was there too<G>. I chatted with another guy who was snagging stuff for his young daughter who was at soccer practice and couldn't attend.

I'm reading an interesting book, *The First Casualty -- From the Crimea to
Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker*.

they paid telegraph operators to write for them, and it didn't really matter if the stories were factual. In fact, these early "correspondents" were

guaranteed a job if they wrote whatever came into their heads, whether or not it had any basis in fact. Thus there were stories about Union soldiers playing football with the heads of Confederate soldiers, and a report that
Atlanta had been captured -- a week before the battle for Atlanta had even started. Generals were reported to have been killed when in fact they hadn't received a scratch. One "reporter" wrote a detailed, "eye-witness" account of a battle that had occurred miles away from him; his story, which had little basis in fact, was applauded in London as the finest reporting of the war.

Today (even though we recently had the debacle of the New York Times

literally don't need columns about stamps. Moreover, every story costs them money to print, even though the copy itself might be free, and they have to have room for ads. Combine these facts of life with an editor's conviction that there isn't enough interest in stamps to warrant a column, and we're sunk.

(There's another factor too, and that the overall economy: Brian Grant Duff at The Bay Coins &amp; Stamps is auctioning an award-winning AIDS Awareness stamp collection put together by Blair Henshaw, who died of AIDS in 2002.
Blair was responsible for lobbying Canada Post to issues its AIDS Awareness stamp and was he was a member of my stamp club, the B.C. Philatelic Society, which has been meeting in Vancouver since 1919. Brian called the editor of
The Vancouver Sun to ask him if he'd run a story about the auction; two other small papers had already done so. The Sun's editor told Brian that he didn't have the manpower since half of their editorial staff had recently been laid off. You can read more about Blair Henshaw on our club web page;
go to <http://www.bcphilatelic.org>.

I once asked both the daily and the weekly papers in Prince George, B.C., if they would be interested in a "How to" photography column. I was teaching a photography course at the time; I am a journalist; I was quite well known in the community as a teacher and photographer. Their response in both cases was a firm "No." The reason? "There's not enough interest in photography."
If that was the attitude about photography, what would their response have been about a stamp collecting column! Laughter?

Bottom line: I don't think we can count on media support of our hobby. Show and Tell is probably the best route. Our club picked up six new members at
VANPEX 2003 on this last weekend.

We just had a show this wekend in Albuquerque, 600,000 in the greater area and it had a steady stream of people attending. Maybe 20 tables at most but probably a few hundred attendees, plus around 20 kids. By the same token, we have no stamp stores at all and only 3 semi-viable coin shops. We do have a number of crafts stores that do a booming business, but not much to the kids in general.

I think life is pretty fast paced in the US so kids spend little time at home except on computer games &amp; TV etc. The media and movies influence them greatly and a lot of illegal activities are glamorized. Little parental supervision or family time occurs and many homes have 2 working parents who are tired after the day and have little time for the kids.
Few read anything, let alone stamp related material. Collecting hobbies are too slow paced for many of the kids here. "Stamp, yeah, cool, Ok, so whats next?" Our societies interests (US) seem to be in making fast cash and spending it just as fast - live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. Little time is spent doing anything leisurely, s in slower paced. The media does not lend itself to quiet time either, nothing much does really, even the entire gambit of Scouting. Apathy is alive and well in the US. Yes, I'm a native US citizen - 55 years young.

If many of the kids in Denmark are as Mette describes as in her group(s) then I'm happy for them as I think they'll be better adjusted adults because they are taking the time to 'discover' and absorb as they live as opposed to discovering and moving on to the next thing quickly and absorbing little along the way.

The West Vancouver Stamp Club meets every other week in the Seniors' Centre in West Vancouver. The Centre is a beautiful building (there's a lot of money in West Vancouver), and the club is quite active, but there's hardly a gray hair in the place -- they're mostly white, and apt to stay that way until they all disappear: the club has to adhere to the Centre's "no members under 60" rule.

I gave a program there earlier this year and was struck by the president's opening comments, which seemed to consist mainly of a list of who had died, who had been hospitalized, and who was going into a rest home. Yeesh! I'm happy to say that my club, the B.C. Phil, has recently been attracting young members -- not kids, but people without gray in their hair and apparently more energy than I've got!

Another nice thing is that we've been getting members from Vancouver's very large Chinese community, both young and middle aged men. Three members,
Norman Sung, Tong Yuen, and Clayton Lam, won regional open class awards for their exhibits at VANPEX 2003 this last weekend.

What a change 50 years has brought! Chinese men were essentially treated like work animals early in British Columbia's history, and for many years were required to pay a head tax to deter immigration. Not until 1949 were
Chinese allowed to vote in provincial elections.

I'm with Dave on this one. When I was a kid here in the U.S.A., some of the big department stores had stamp departments. Not any more. In fact, brick-and-mortar stamp stores have all but disappeared. Also, the American stamp publications all have declining readership. Here in Texas, the number of, and attendance at, stamp shows is on a quick decline. For example, I attended a recent bourse in San Antonio, a city of one million inhabitants, and there were, maybe, ten other collectors there during the entire day (not counting the dealers). Young people here have zero interest in stamps. The same is true for 99.99 percent of adults, too. I hope the situation is different in other states and countries.

I have to wonder sometimes if there is a future. Here in Rochester it

media. The one exception has been the RPA annual show, but even that is a quick soundbite that you could miss if you happened to sneeze at that moment.

for them a short weekly stamp collecting feature. For free no less! Sorry,

anything like that since.
When I lived in Hong Kong the South China Daily Post had a regular stamp feature, sometimes several times a week.
Kids, or anyone else for that matter, will not be attracted to our hobby if they never hear about it. Like lemmings people at the post office buy the "flag &amp; whatever" stamp offered by clerks who seem brainwashed that the commemoratives are "collectables".
Could any of the following promote our hobby?:
local stamp clubs sponsor school stamp club activities PO clerks offer commemoratives to customers

organize stamp clubs in various civic groups, etc.
work with boy and girls scouts there's probably more I'm sure.
Dave (it was a nasty rainy day... affected my mood?)

Hmmm my problem is that i'm extremely geeky but don't look it.
I deal with this quite well by always taking a copy of a stamp magazine to the pub with me - works wonders for fending off unwanted male attention when i want a quiet drink

This is one of the reasons our club would like to use the mid school.
Our Pres thinks that several of the more learned members would be happy

jooint thing, plus it might just make a new stamp collector.

I have an interest in airliners and one of the magazines (or maybe both) decorate the readers' mail pages with airliner topical stamps. I wonder if any of those stamps pictured spark any interest in our hobby.

Dave (oddly enough, I don't collect airliner stamps)

Not the staff!!!! This comes from the Ministry of Education (I know, it sounds like something from George Orwell, which might not be far off the mark). For something like 15 years, the responsibility for education has more and more been taken out of the hands of local school districts, which have also lost millions of dollars in funding. When my wife quit teaching in
2001, her English department had no money for new textbooks, and school libraries were not only unable to purchase books, librarians were losing their jobs. Oddly, there was always money for computers.....

One long prescribed approach to assure the future of stamp collecting is to introduce stamp collecting to youth (generally ages 5-12), realize that by age 13 their attention will turn to the opposite sex or other
"in" things, but hope that after eventual marriage and having kids, they will want to pass their old collection and interest in philately to their kids. Then, after retirement, the parent will return to the hobby in a more serious way.

My good friend and recent candidate for APS president -- Nancy Clark -- goes a step further. She is a strong believer that introducing young collectors to philatelic exhibiting -- generally one frame (or 16 pages)

OK, in school I played hockey (good enough to be varsity &amp; play in amature, semi-pro &amp; professional). I was about in the middle academically (after overcoming dyslexia, that was a feat!). Perhaps I was a bit introverted at times, certainly not now. Don't like computer adventure games (or most games for that matter).
Dave (exception or exceptional?)

Well, you should collect airliner stamps! No, actually, you should go for tall ships or rutabagas on stamps. That way, there will be enough airliner stamps for me!

I suspect in most cases like the one you mention (stamps in non-stamp publications), the stamps are useful for design purposes, but the people reading those particular publication are already deeply into their other
"hobbies" and don't have time or money for more.

More importantly, if they don't have the particular gene or "bug" or whatever it that causes us collectors to droof over bits of colored paper or old envelopes, they might enjoy the images, but they won't ever collect stamps. The students who used to join my school stamp clubs were almost universally "of a type" -- quiet, introspective but not necessary introverted, non-athletic, and not the best students academically.
Unfortunately for our hobby, the same type of student also seems well-suited to sit for hours in front of a computer to play adventure games.

It would be interesting to know if any psychological "theories of stamp collecting" (or collecting in general) have ever been developed.

I'm speaking of the younger generation. I hope they take the time to slow down just a little and look around them as there is a lot happening that they are simply passing by. This is why I'm introducing my grandson to stamp and coin collecting, and perhaps models inthe near future. I think its important that he know there are other things available for him to occupy his time with too. I've nothing against TV and computer games in general, jsut suggesting that there is a place for leisurly things too.

Its good to hear that the Scouts are alive and well. Cetainly not the case in Abq saddly.

<snipped>

Funny thing about those old laws, my mom told me recently that the property she and my dad bought for our home in 1948, about 10 miles north of Seattle, has a condition that they never sell the land to a '...person of color.' Thats one of the old things I don't mind seeing go bye bye.

Depending on the jurisdiction, of course, this might be an opportunity to promote stamp collecting or a complete waste of time.

In British Columbia, the provincial government has pared education spending not just to the bone, but deep into the bone, and seriously impaired the teachers' ability to teach outside the curricular box. There just isn't time in the average classroom to teach more than what is required, and there is virtually no extracurricular time. In fact, many teachers are refusing to sponsor any extracurricular activities. I quit teaching just before the worst of these things happened; I could easily start teaching again if I wanted to, but there is *nothing* that could induce me to do that.

When I was still living in Prince George, I approached a former colleague to see if he would be interested in using stamps in his social studies program at the grade 7 level. He just shook his head sadly, and said that he hardly had time to do what he had to do, much less introduce anything that did not fit strictly within the confines of the curriculum.

City funded and operated, but I'm sure there are some form of Fed or St funds involved too - theres gotta be - and check this out, unless you are ALSO a member of any of the Senior Centers here, you are not allowed to attend that one clubs meetings, plus of course you have to be a member of that club. Having recently retired from City employment of 28 years I can vouch for them doing some really funky stuff. I'm suspecting this may be a rule of that particular center though. Not a place I care to go to though, not with that attitude.

Our City has teamed up with our school system and they encourage using the schools as community centers. City funds then pay for a number of amenities, plus the wage of someone to oversee the mtg area and keep the school open until the mtgs are over. Our club is looking into moving from the Church they are now at to the middle School my wife works at for mtgs. They have all sorts of clubs mtg there, incl wome real space cadets (no pun intended) at the weekly SciFi club.

<snip>

Our focus in NM is higher teacher wages, classroom $ and activities are
2nd. Our teacher pay is one of the lowest in the country and to a degree NMs population intelligence reflects that.

The teachers I've met so far are always looking for a new approach to teaching a subject so using stamps to assist may be something they'd embrace. Our curriculums seem to be failry open in some areas, others are extremely rigid. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I bought a small old book at the show (bourse?) last weekend that had a bunch of old US stamps in it, Scotts 200-600 range mostly(just finished going thru it), 116 stamps in it all together, uncl a number of airmails. The book is about American History and as the events unfold in chronological order, a piece is written about each event &amp; a stamp of that event is inserted in the book. A pretty nice idea I think since you also get a nifty picture (the stamp) along with info on the event. As a display it would be fascinating I think to younger kids. Anyway, I paid $3 for the book. It was given as a Xmas gift to a young lady in 1935 as per the writing in the front. None of the stamps are newer than 1936.