ScottV Stamps

Here's the perfect follow-up to yesterday's post ... the very next stamp in the catalog.  Bremen #15. Germany Bremen #15 used – the classic 5-silbergroschen key design. 2021 catalog value $3750.00. A user posted some feedback about it: "This item looks to be yellow green. Also, the right edge has been trimmed and reperfed. I would suggest to have this item certified." Eagle eyes.  I would have to agree on the color, but I don't have specialist catalogs for this.  Well, I do have an old Michel specialized catalog, but the choice remains: post a generic Scott value that's up to date, or a more specific identification with a prices that's 25 years old.  As for the reperfed right else, it does look like the perfs are a bit too clean and shaped a bit differently. I'm not sure the reason we would pay $20 or $30 (or whatever it costs these days) to get a certificate that points out damage I didn't see when I looked at it.  I agree that these high-priced s

Here is a stamp I've only seen a times before.  Germany Bremen #14 used – the classic 10gr key design. This one has straight edges at bottom and right, but that's probably how the sheets were cut, notice th black guidelines.  A fine impression, and with a (2021) catalog value $1125.00, it was a nice find.

The Postal History Foundation has a lot of mixtures available.  They always have off paper world mixes for about $40 per pound, and the volunteer asked me if I wanted larger stamps or smaller ones.  At one glance, I knew I wanted the smaller ones.  Instead of pretty topicals, the smaller mix had older stamps, and way more of them per pound, not to mention how many postmarks I expect to find. I had a few nights to fiddle with them in hotel rooms, and picked some countries or groupings that had good quantities, like early Belgium, early Poland, pre-war Japan, Germany AMG, Germany Reichspost, and postmarks, of course.  I soon had enough Belgium that I could split out some specialty batches: railways, precancels, early issues with tabs, even a few of the "-10%" variants. Here's a shot of the mixes back at home. I started sorting them by first letter, with a quart baggie for each letter (although some letters like D-E and K-L never have huge amounts, so they can go together) .

4/15/2024: We stopped at the Postal History Foundation in Tucson.  I had not been there in about 12 years. They're still going strong, with a whole museum and educational area, tons to do, endless stamps to support and buy, and a world class research library with about 30,000 volumes.  They have many shelves of lots ready to buy, from pound mixes to individual stamps, bins of 10c covers, you name it.  For the rest of our 6-day trip, I had the urge to go back and help sort stamps, or buy more stamps to sort at home.

You may have noticed a ton of attractive flower definitives in any recent mixture from Germany.  The series starts in 2005, where the Scott catalog has 18 sheet stams and 4 coils (#2307-2326B).  I recent got a few ounces of just these stamps off paper and was surprised how many values there are.  The second series (#2404-2423A) has 12 sheet stamps and 9 self-adhesives.  Throughout the series, since these are all in euros, the conversion to US dollar catalog values is about $1.80 per euro.  Germany continued to issue a few new values in this set every year, for any changes to postal rates, through at least 2019 when my catalog ends. It's a very colorful set which has a lot more to see than I initially thought.  I will fill some stock pages with these and see if anyone is interested.   I have other stock pages planned that are just the high values from the past 40 years (over 200pf or €1).  This would be more of a pure catalog value discount dump since all of these stamps catalog for

I was just sorting a big mix of Brazil commemoratives, getting them ready to fill up a stack of stockpages. They all have prominent dates in the design, "Brasil 2001" and so on. So as I sort them, they deserve a shout out for making life easy for their collectors. Right after that, I had a pile of Antigua topical sets with no dates, which wastes a lot of our time looking over 6 to 8 pages of catalog entries trying to visually find a match.  Dates are so helpful for collectors trying to organize and locate specific stamps that I am surprised so few countries include them in their designs. Even if they don't care about collectors or convenience, you would think they would all want a date stamp as a kind of copyright notice.  The most detailed year info was always China, which used to have the year at bottom left along with the set number and stamp number within the set, like "69.(4-4)". This is essentially an exact catalog number, as no two would ever be the