Local Shows III: Country Mixes

Sometimes, the dealers at our local show (Sandipex in Poway, CA) bring a box of mixtures.  I find these hard to resist.  Back when I was doing this as a half-time job, and came to all the shows I could get to, some of the guys would keep a big big box of things for me so when I showed up I would be hooked.  That was a lot of fun, and I could probably ask them to do so again, but time and the pandemic have thinned out the events over time.

Here are the mixes I found today:

This was just a fraction of what was in that big box on the table, but these were the ones that appealed to me.  The world mix looked like it had a bunch of Malaysia in there, and it turned out to be over a half pound of Malaysia in there (nothing fancy but it's an hard mix to find).

For the others, they were unusual quantities for those countries.  Costa Rica usually only shows up as a glassine or two here and there, but this baggie had about 1000 of them.  The Spain mix had a good range of commemoratives.  Honduras?  When do we ever see that much Honduras in one place, except for one of each hinged to album pages?

I'm not interested in sorting these and looking up every catalog number and having 100 glassines of Spain sitting around for years.  I usually set aside all the postmarks, make mini-collections of one of each of the others (maybe by decade), and the remainder is a budget/bulk lot.

Along the way, I get the enjoyment from the sorting process itself, as my previous posts have explained.

Sure there is work involved, but it doesn't feel like work.  There is plenty of room for markup, but I'm not forced to worry about the profit from every batch.  It all works out.  I have a hobby, it has a certain cash flow, and it works out.


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