First touch with philately

My grandpa (87) conferred his stamp collection upon me. So far I didn’t have any interest in philately, but the effort for building such a collection is impressing, and every single stamp is an artwork of its own. He has three(!) complete collections of freshly printed Austrian stamps from 1970-2001 and wants to hand them out to his children and grandchildren. He stopped collecting at the beginning of 2002 where the old Austrian schilling was superseded by today’s euro.

I want to find out how much that collection is worth, but I won’t sell it. On the contrary, I want to see if it makes sense to complete the collection by the Austrian euro stamps from 2002-2007 and to subscribe to the new prints.

So far I was only interested a bit in numismatics, where I bought a collection of circulating coins from the euro countries (even a set of four coins from San Marino) plus some affordable sealed euro starter kits from various countries (Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Spain and Finland). I wasn’t interested in accumulative euro coins so far. I like to collect beer coasters from all around the world, but not in an purposive manner.