My first stamp album

I’m sharing my very first stamp album—reluctantly passed to me by my mom when I was still in primary school, simply because my sister had no interest in stamps. At the time, I could never have imagined how that small, unassuming album would quietly stay with me through the years.

Stamp collecting began shortly after the introduction of the first postage stamps in the 1840s, when people decided that these small printed labels—such as the iconic Penny Black—were too meaningful to be discarded, choosing instead to keep them as mementos of letters sent, distances crossed, and moments shared.

As time went on, my own way of caring for stamps changed. I moved from a simple paper album to plastic stamp sheets, carefully slotted into file folders—knowledge I picked up along the way, learning how collectors before me had protected what they cherished.

Alongside my own collection are stamp albums that once belonged to my grandfather and my sixth granduncle. My grandfather kept his stamps in a reused exercise book, fixing them in place with ordinary glue. With time, the acidic nature of the glue took its toll, and the stamps aged along with the pages they rested on. 

My granduncle, in contrast, owned a country-specific stamp album and mounted his stamps using hinges, reflecting a different understanding and discipline of his era.

Together, these albums reveal more than stamps. They show how each generation collected with the tools and knowledge they had, leaving behind traces not only of history, but of themselves.