Librarians, teachers, and families, take note: there’s a bright new book on the market guaranteed to boost children’s early interest and participation in the most popular hobby in the world – stamp collecting.

Stamp Collecting: For Canadian Kids is an attractive, Canadian-based introduction to philately. Elizabeth MacLeod touches on such basics as stamp history and trivia, stamp vocabulary, starting collections, stamp sources, and essential equipment. Her text is easy to read and features frequent flashes of humour. Her two-page topic spreads are well prefaced by reasonably snappy captions. The real treat for MacLeod’s readers, however, is the Canadian orientation she brings to the topic.

Illustration is also a key component of Stamp Collecting. The “how to” drawings and cleverly comical, cartoon-style work of Esperanca Melo and Bill Slavin mesh well to support the text. The real illustrative delight, though, is the wonderful colour reproduction of Canadian stamps provided courtesy of Canada Post. The stamp repros are what make this book special. The superheroes soaring, leaping, and otherwise posing athletically on the book’s covers, the stamp strips accenting page heads, and the many single stamp examples, introduce young Canadians to a national legacy. To youngsters outside Canada, the stamps provide distinctive glimpses of many aspects of Canada and Canadian life.

Stamp Collecting: For Canadian Kids, a comparative heavyweight when it comes to Canadian content, is light to middleweight as a generic introduction to stamp collecting. Other fairly recent stamp collecting books for children such as Hamlyn’s Focus on Stamps and Simon and Schuster’s Stamps: A Young Philatelist’s Guide, are larger scale undertakings that offer greater generic scope and detail.

Children eight years old and older, new to the idea of stamp collecting and interested in Canadian stamps, will be the best audience for this book. On its own, the book is a good first introduction to the concept and fascination of stamp collecting. Accompanied strategically by some collecting tools and stamps, it may well serve to launch a new collector.