about well centred

Hello.
こんにちは。

I am a Japanese stamp collector based in London.  My profession is design – I design furniture, household products, lighting, interior and exhibitions.  TNA Design Studio

 

< Why I collect stamps >

Postage stamps are functional items for document delivery, and sometimes they make me smile – when I feel the passion of the designer, engraver or printer.  Stamps reflect an atmosphere of the time, economy and politics of the country.  I see those processes through my profession – so, I am interested in the world behind stamps.

 

< How I started >

In my childhood I often saw my mother cutting envelopes to collect used stamps.  There were always red circles on her calendar, noting ‘new stamp release’.  When I left home for study, she regularly sent me letters with her favorite stamps on, and she continued when I started to live in London.

British stamp design got me into this hobby and when foreign friends from college returned to their countries and started to send me cards, I discovered a wider world of stamps.

I inherited my mother’s collection in 1999 – Japanese mint stamps from the 1960’s plus two shoe-boxes full of used, non-removed stamps.  Shortly after I became a subscriber of Royal Mail stamps and started to visit stamp shops in foreign cities.  Ten years later, I started to sort out my mother’s collection.  When I looked at partly assembled files and bags of used stamps, I recognised that I am a Stamp Collector!  Then I started this blog in summer 2009.

 

< collecting themes >

My collecting themes have been changing from time to time.

By my profession, I am interested in design generally.  As a weekend cyclist, I cannot resist collecting bicycle and cycling stamps, as well as road safety and environmental issues.  And more and more I want to know what I have been eating – so, agriculture and fishing are coming in, as well as forest management and weather…

 

Since I started this blog, it guided me to know what kind of stamps I am most attracted to, and why.  I have surprised myself that I have not lost interest in them after 12 years and 700 posts – so, I have renewed the appearance of this blog, and added a category of selling stamps on eBay, which I started during the pandemic lock-down.

I hope you find some joy from this blog, too.

 

Tomoko Azumi / summer 2021