About Me

So who's behind this web site? Well, I'm a 50-something Danish national, now living in the US Pacific Northwest.

I started collecting stamps when I was 6 or 7 years old. My father managed a company that did a lot of international trade and he started bringing home colorful stamps from all around the world for me. Now it is almost 50 years later, and the stamp collecting hobby has always remained part of my life.

A stamp much like the ones in the first lot

I got interested in the "Ringtyp" issue from Sweden in my early 20's. Back then, there were still street level stamp dealers in Copenhagen, and one summer I was home from the US on holiday and wandered into a stamp shop.

In the (by now long defunct) dealer's store I found boxes and bags of stamps in messy accumulations. One of these was someone else's attempt to start a collection of nice town cancels on early Swedish stamps. Rather fascinated by the neat looking postmarks (much nicer looking than old Danish cancels), I coughed up the princely sum of 800,- Danish kr. (about US $125-- a small fortune to an otherwise starving college student in 1983) and bought the box of album leaves, glassine envelopes and stockbooks.

For many years, I only collected cancels on Ringtyp stamps, but gradually started noticing (and recognizing) an assortment of small plate flaws on these issues.

I was never able to find much literature about them-- the Swedish Facit catalogue did not seem to go into near the detail of the Danish AFA Specialized catalogue for Denmark-- so I just set them aside to "learn more about later."

It was really not until stamp collecting and the Internet became thoroughly "acquainted" that I started to learn more about these early Swedish stamps. To be perfectly honest, I hadn't tried very hard-- choosing instead to stay with "easier" material, such as working on my more general Denmark and Sweden stamp collections.

With wife Sarah in Palm Springs, 2014

In 2016, it finally-- somewhat unexpectedly-- became time for me to look at these stamps again.

Owing to a series of difficult personal circumstances, I found myself needing to sell both my Danish and Swedish collections to raise cash for personal expenses. The "Ringtyp" stamp accumulation stayed intact-- after all, it's difficult to sell highly specialized material on short notice, especially when you have hundreds of duplicates of not particularly rare stamps.

So what am I planning? As time goes on, I am hoping to start cataloguing the constant varieties I find on these stamps, along with sharing some items from my Swedish cancel collection. I will be working with the Ring Type Study Circle, which is a sub-group of the Scandinavian Collectors Club-- hopefully we can get more collectors interested in specializing in this still quite affordable classic stamp issue from Sweden.