Philippe started this collection of “Shells on Stamps” at the age of 10 together with his mother Cecile Hoskens. Once a month they would go to the local stamp club to locate and purchase stamps with shells.

After a few years, the collection started to become important and with the help of his father Guido the rarer stamps could be found by visiting stamp auction houses around Europe.

Cecile took over the stamp collection entirely with the move to the Philippines to start Conchology, Inc. In 10 years, she managed to complete the collection to a few hundred missing shell stamps. A fantastic achievement, but due to the deluge of newly issued real and bogus stamps, she lost interest.

Philippe took over the collection 4 years ago. He decided to limit the collection up to the year 2000. Together with the assistance of Lourina Segovia, a big work of re-cataloguing all the "shells on stamps" in the collection was started. By combining the Tom Walker Catalog, Stanley Gibbons, Carel Touw Catalog and stamps discovered during the many collection purchases of Poppe stamps, he could define the current status of the collection and map out the direction he wanted to go with it.

It took a full year to develop beautiful thematic stock pages for each country, bringing out the beauty of the individual stamps and sets in the collection. The result can be seen here on this web page.

Contact

Currently the collection houses 5407 stamps of the 6039 documented stamps from 1859 to 2000. 632 stamps are still missing. Missing stamps are shown in grey scale images. Any offer with missing stamps is welcome. You can email Philippe Poppe.

Poppe Stamps, Inc.