You're a "stamp person"? Look at my stuff.
Once people find out you are a "stamp person", it's just a matter of time before some friend of a friend gives said friend a box of stamps to give to you, so you can evaluate their little treasures for free. Or if you're running a table at a show or have any kind of storefront, people will bring in their box or album directly, whether you're obviously busy or not.
I think we all know what these collectors are thinking or expecting. Maybe you can do all the hours of work for them? Sure, they usually say I can do all the work and keep "like 20 or 30 percent." I won't even get into the huge disparity between what the owners think their stuff is worth (must be big $$$ in there) and what it looks like to us (more work). I don't have the extra hours to do that work. And half the time we're expected to offer cash on the spot. But ... I already have a hundred times as many stamps in stock (not joking) and suppliers I trust. I don't need a few hundred more common stamps. They are literally worth nothing to me right now.
Let's not underestimate how many hours it takes to catalog even one small album of stamps. If you can crank them out at one stock card per minute, 1000 stamps is probably 300 sets & singles, so that's 5 hours plus the cost of those 300 cards or glassines. The really inquisitive collectors will catalog their own stamps and constantly be learning. It is mostly the "quick value" people who want someone else to take care of it for them. I have never had someone take me up on the totally fair rate of even $20/hour to apply my experience to their stuff. Not to mention that a new set of catalogs is now over $600 each year. (So yeah, I'm down to buying a set every 5 years.)
If you're just writing the catalog values in the page margins in pencil to come up with a grand total, it still takes at least two hours per 1000 stamps. And then the final value is mostly theoretical. Most basic collections sell for 20% to 30% of the catalog value after all that work. Some collectors would want to buy the whole thing so they can break it up themselves, other will skip it because they only need those two sets from the 1930s and the rest would be duplicates.
After 40 years in the business, I can eyeball the little hoards people show me fairly accurately. The first look often says it all. The last batch I was shown was in an old dirty box in old dirty albums with a big sticky baggie full of 1960s stamps on paper. Sure, there were some okay early USA stamps on those pages (up to 10c Columbians and such), but they were heavy hinged or had heavy smudge cancels. When I did try to look more closely, some of them were so brittle they just fell apart. Sorry, you could maybe save $500 catalog value of minor defect items out of there, but they would be stamps that almost every collector has seen before; and after an additional hour of scanning them all and typing them up, they could sit on some auction site for months and never sell, or finally sell for 10% of catalog, so you did 3 hours of work and waited a year for $50. First look says there's no real value there, and it turns out there's no real value there.
So, the first look should be at how well the stamps were treated. I have seen stamps that were licked and stuck onto pages, or hinged onto high-acid construction paper, or even on-paper clippings taped to pages. But if the stamps are in a nice stock book or a professional album, it's much more likely that what's inside has more value and has been treated with more care. Sometimes an old stockbook opens and there is almost all of North Borneo complete, and now we have something to talk about. Although I have also seen cases where the book is worth more than the stamps.
This is just a glimpse at the economics of "here, can you look at my stamps for me." I'm always happy to talk about the items we collect, but it does not always lead to money in the bank. Sometimes the conversation is also more memorable than the stamps.
Comments
Post a Comment