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Some readers might have wondered about same articles end/or checklists which contained subjects which are hardly connected with speleology. For that reason I like to give my opinion what you can expect in SSC end why.

In the past I found out if I did NOT mention something far away from caves virtually always a letter would come asking if I had never heard about it. So to avoid the need to explain all this: edgy items are mentioned.

At this moment my policy is to reduce any checklist as much as possible to one topic. I just do not believe in a list of over thousand "cave related stamps". It is just to difficult to find something back in it. I also do not list stamps in an alphabetic order. The reason: names of countries are differently written in different languages. I prefer just the date of issue, or at least the year. It's also easier to add new stamps to such a list.

About checklists. To take an example: Avicenna. There is no stamp depicting him together with a cave; still he did same cave-research. Also there are not that many stamps depicting him. In such a case I try to make a list of all stamps depicting his portrait. But now e.g. Jules Verne. In this case there are stamps related to him end showing caves. In such a case I put only those on the list, end ignore the plain portraits.

About helmets. There are probably hundreds of stamps depicting miners helmets. Although cavers use (sometimes) the same helmets, there are so many of these stamps I even will not try to list them. About climbers. Originally I made for myself a list of stamps clearly showing techniques, since there is no stamp showing a caver using these. But as a fact I know same of our readers collect "climbing" end it is for them the list was published. Recently an updated climbers-list was published, but I admit this one gives too many stamps which are absolutely NOT cave related.

We also have same subscribers only interested in rock-art. Since it's sometimes difficult to draw a line between rock-engravings end cave-art, all these stamps are mentioned.

Sometimes I also change my mind. In one of the earlier SSC's I published a list of minerals, "as found in caves". However, as it turned out, virtually every mineral is at least found once in a cave, so this would mean all minerals could be collected. But
probably none of these depicted minerals is from a cave, so I skipped this whole list. The only ones which will be mentioned in the future are the reel limestones, calcite, dolomite, aragonite.

But again I like to emphasize: NOBODY has to collect everything as mentioned in SSC. Collect only what really interests YOU.