You know you’re too specialized when…

Experts often recommend picking a subject area to focus on when collecting stamps. The logic is that collecting from the totality of all the many hundreds of thousands of stamps ever printed in the world can be too overwhelming. Picking a subject area like “cats” or “World War II” can help you focus and build a satisfying, cohesive collection. Personally, I’m a generalist, preferring to embrace the totality of human experience instead of arbitrarily limiting myself. However, I do focus on certain areas to a degree. The US and Canada, because they’re familiar to me, and easily available. Great Britain because I’m an Anglophile. Hungary and Austria because I love their design aesthetic. Mongolia because they’re so shameless in creating stamps just to get collectors in other countries to buy them (unless Mongolians really do love I Love Lucy, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe) and there are so many over-the-top big and pretty stamps that totally appeal to the kid in me. So I’ve got nothing against specialization per se. I think you need to be careful about getting too overspecialized, however. Case in point:

Still, I guess there would be something kind of fun about collecting something so specific as Jewish chess masters. It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever have a complete album of every stamp ever published in Hungary. However, the collector of Jewish chess masters on stamps has a reachable goal. Chicks would TOTALLY dig it, too! “Hey baby, come back to my place and check out my collection of Jewish chess master stamps. I’ve got every one ever published…”