Approaching Mixtures

I always enjoyed buying worldwide mixtures on or off paper and sorting them out.  My first sort of a big mixture is usually by first letter of the country name, but sometimes I simply sort by continent first.  Since I am fascinated with postmarks, I often keep a pile of those on the side.  When sorting A to Z, having 26 piles would take up too much space, but there are some first letters that are hardly used at all, so piles like D-E, J-K, N-O, P-Q, U-Z just happen naturally.  This will still fit in two lids of bankers boxes, four rows of three piles in each lid.  I have always had cats, so it's easy to stack the lids and put them in the closet if I don't finish the sort in the first sitting.

There is a general economics of getting a general world mix at maybe $180 per 10 pounds and ending up with some smaller amounts of much less common mixes.  Country-specific mixes always cost more on the source price lists, so maybe an ounce of Japan might sell for $6, and a really odd mix like Luxembourg could be $12 per ounce.  Whether that actually equates to catalog value is an open question -- it's more a matter of supply.

I ran mailing lists early on (1980s-90s) or little classified ads in Linn's (1990s) where I would list these odd mixtures once I got 8 or 10 units of each one.  I have sold ounces from Bermuda, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Mozambique, and yes, Luxembourg;  even some more specialized mixes like splitting Germany into Reich issues, Bundespost issues and Deutschland recent issues, or Netherlands semi-postals only.  

But the economics also go the other way -- you are guaranteed to accumulate a lot of the super common cheap stuff that isn't going to sell no matter what you do: common definitives from Denmark or Canada, for example.  One time I had about 30 pounds of just the Machin queens from Great Britain that I finally just donated -- even though many of them have decent catalog value, nobody really needs thousands of them.  On the upside, they often catch nice circular date stamps.  

Back in the 80s or 90s, selling big boxes of material was pretty routine, but these days shipping is so expensive and the services are so fussy that I rarely sell anything over 4 ounces; even then I prefer simple lots under an ounce. Because as soon as an envelope gets thick it becomes a package, a minimum of $4 to ship things that used to cost 75 cents.  So big bulk mixtures have some challenges these days.

I do get the itch a few times a year and look for a new pound or two to search through.

Here's a batch from Zambia that I listed recently ...