Looking after a collection for the long term

A stamp collection can outlast its owner by generations, or be ruined in a single wet season. The difference is rarely luck. It comes down to how the collection is stored, how the climate around it is managed, and whether anyone knows what it contains.

The beginner series covered the everyday habits (lesson 02). This guide is about the long term: the decisions that protect a collection for decades, and make it easy for someone else to take over one day.

Albums and stock books that last

Storage materials age, and some age badly. When buying albums, stock books, mounts or cover pockets, check what they are made of:

• Avoid soft PVC pockets, sleeves and pages. Over time PVC releases plasticisers that make stamps sticky and stain paper. Stable plastics are polyester and polypropylene; good products say “PVC-free” or “archival”.
• Prefer acid-free paper for album leaves and interleaving. Acidic paper yellows and becomes brittle, and the acid can migrate into stamps.
• Use interleaving — thin glassine or acid-free sheets between album pages — so stamps on facing pages don’t rub or stick.
• Avoid self-adhesive mounts and tape anywhere near a stamp or cover. The adhesive spreads and stains, and cannot be removed safely.

Store albums upright on a shelf, like books, and don’t pack them tightly. Albums stacked flat put weight on the pages, and in humid weather the gum on unused stamps can stick to whatever is pressed against it.

Covers and postcards are best kept in individual PVC-free sleeves, standing upright in a box, rather than in albums where they bend.

Humidity and the Indian climate

For most collections in India, the greatest long-term risk is humidity. Damp softens gum, encourages the brown spots and staining collectors call toning or foxing, and helps mould and insects. Heat makes all of these worse.

• Choose the room carefully. An inside wall, off the floor, away from bathrooms, kitchens and windows, in a room that stays at a fairly steady temperature.
• Keep air moving. A closed, unventilated cupboard in a humid house can be worse than an open shelf. If you use a cupboard, open it regularly.
• Use desiccant. Silica gel, in sealed boxes or near albums, absorbs moisture. Indicating gel changes colour when saturated, and can be dried out and reused.
• Consider a hygrometer — an inexpensive humidity meter — near the collection. It tells you whether your precautions work, especially through the monsoon.
• Check twice a year, ideally before and after the monsoon. Look through each album for sticking, spots and insects. Problems caught early can usually be stopped; problems found after years cannot.

Keep any stamp with toning away from the rest of the collection, so the damage cannot spread.

Keeping an inventory

An inventory is a list of what the collection contains, and it is the most useful thing a collector can make. It helps you buy (you know what you already have), sell (you know what is there), insure (you can prove it) and hand on (someone else can understand it).

It need not be elaborate. For each album or box, note:

• what it covers — country, period, theme;
• the important items, with catalogue numbers and condition;
• what you paid for the better items, and where you bought them;
• any certificates, kept together in one safe place.

For Indian stamps, marking what you own in this site’s catalogue keeps a running list on your collection page. Photographs of the best pages, kept somewhere other than where the collection is stored, are a valuable addition.

Insurance and valuations

Many household insurance policies cover a stamp collection only up to a small limit, or not at all, and some require collections to be listed separately. If your collection has real value, read your policy and ask your insurer what is covered, for which risks — theft, fire, flood, water damage — and what proof they would need after a loss.

Specialist collectables insurance exists for larger collections. Whatever the policy, an insurer will expect an inventory, and for valuable items a recent valuation. Valuations go out of date; review them every few years, and after any major purchase.

Keep the inventory, photographs, invoices and certificates in a different place from the collection itself. A record that burns with the albums is no record at all.

Leaving instructions for your family

Many collections are sold for far less than they are worth because the family had no idea what they were looking at, and sold in a hurry to the first buyer. A few pages of instructions, kept with your will or your important papers, prevent that:

• where the collection, the inventory and the certificates are kept;
• which parts are valuable, and which are not;
• two or three dealers, auction houses or fellow collectors you trust to advise them;
• what you would like to happen — sold, kept, given to a society or a young collector;
• a warning not to soak, sort or break up anything before getting advice.

The guide How to sell a collection without losing money is written for exactly that moment; leaving your family a link to it is a small kindness.