Linn's Stamp News Magazine

I subscribed to Linn's Stamp News for many years. I always looked forward to the column on forthcoming new international issues, since I'm both a topical and new issue collector; I used to underline or highlight coming attractions I planned to add to my collection and found it a valuable collecting aid.

"Collecting on a Shoestring" was one of my favorite regular columns and I could generally pick up other interesting how-to tips or information from each issue. I voted every year in Linn's annual "best and worst" poll of US stamps and related postal material.

However, I gradually grew disenchanted with Linn's. The focus shifted from worldwide to US collecting, which happens not to be my area of interest. Furthermore, the paper became a forum for USPS-bashing and every issue featured complaining letters to the editor from collectors whining about:

1) the excessive number of new US issues;

2) the strain it put on their pocketbooks to acquire all of them;

3) the frivolous or irrelevant subject matter of US commemorative issues,

and

4) the poor designs of contemporary US stamps.

I kept reading all these whining letters and becoming increasingly unsympathetic. Nobody was pointing a gun at any of these collectors and forcing them to buy every new US issue. The most obvious solution, to collect only those new issues they liked and to bypass the ones they didn't, never seemed to occur to them. D-uhh.

All this griping, along with the shift in focus from general/worlwide to US collecting, made Linn's expendable and I didn't renew my subscription. I definitely wouldn't recommend this publication to worldwide collectors, or to collectors who actually enjoy the more light-hearted US issues featuring Tweetie Bird, Snoopy and Sylvester, because they'll find themselves in the minority among Linn's conservative, tradtional majority. They'd have better luck with Global Stamp News, which is what I read now.