ScottV Stamps

After writing about the Under-Collection in the last post, it seems like the natural follow-up would be the "Gotta Keep Them All" school of collecting, where owners just fill stock pages with every copy of every stamp they find, hinging down hundreds of the same stamp, book after book of them. I suppose these books are usually made for trading, although if I put together a trasing book, I would have as much variety as I can pack onto the pages.  If someone doesn't want that 10k stamp from Russia the first time they see it, why would they want a whole page of them? In my own collecting history, the one thing these books are good for is picking through them for postmarks, which I have done on many occasions.  If the stamps are old, then we can search them for tiny design differences (flyspecking) or plate positions.  I admit have spent hours staring at pages of penny reds over the years, just trying to grasp all the details. It's just another style of collecting.  Mayb...

About one out of four of the big collections I handle have a detail which always bugs me: hinging stamps underneath other stamps.  It almost makes sense when the top stamp is mint and the under-stamp is used, to show that you found one of each.  But it's can get really sloppy, making the whole page an unsightly jumble for no apparent reason.  It's already a considerable challenge to fill most album pages for a country.  Why would you need to have more than one of each stamp, and then why overlap them so you can't even see them all?  On some pages, only a few stamps are overlapping, but on other pages it's 80-90% of them. If I am going to scan the collection and sell it, it's just a visual mess and makes it hard to appreciate just how many stamps are on the page.  I have come to think of the hidden stamps as the "Under-Collection".  The collection under the main collection. With some of the recent collections I have been selling for the library, I start...

I just bought a big box of mixtures that was all sorted by country into legal-sized envelopes.  I like mixtures, and sorting through them is one of my favorite parts of the hobby.  But there's also something routine about a box full of country envelopes.  It's usually the same cheap, general stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised when these envelopes were stuffed with recent issues, even more so when I saw the best mixes were from Latin America.  In a typical pound of worldwide stamps, you might find a few hundred Latin America, and only a handful of those will be recent issues.  But here, the charity that put this together must have had multiple missions in those countries.  Imagine my surprise to find about 1000 stams from Venezuela from 1990 to 2020.  I see those so rarely, I actually had no idea the price ranges, or even which stamps were definitives.  I finally have a big enough sample to study up on the different issues and see how the mark...

After a lifetime of collecting and wheeling and dealing in stamps, it's still fun looking at new lots.  You never know what you might see when you crack open the cover.  I was asked to break down a classic Germany collection, and since the States were in another volume, the book started with the 1872 eagles.  There are two main varieties here: small shield (coat of arms) and large shield.  Surprisingly, the collector had identified them all properly, so here is the complete first issue of Germany: It's #1 to #11, small shield, and the collector did a good job of picking fine+ examples of all his stamps; these have all perfs intact, no markings on back, minimal hinge marks and no thins.  The Scott catalog (2021) decided not to add up the price of the set -- maybe it rarely comes up as a complete set?  Anyway, the total is $961.25 and I listed it starting at $359. About those different shield types ... I always think of it as the small shield has the eagle's ...

I came across a big USA collection and was asked to pick top items to be sold on Hipstamp, and on page one there was a USA #1 and a USA #LO2.  I have been collecting for 50 years now, and started selling mixtures in 1983, so that's 40 years.  But USA stamps never got my interest.  I live in the USA, and I always collected stamps to see what the rest of the world was doing.  So, even after breaking down hundreds of (non-USA) collections for Lyle Clark and Lee Clark (2000-2021), and my own business, I have never actually had a USA #1 to look at up close.   It's a classic, and this was a 4-margin copy with moderate postmark, but I have to say it's a pretty dull stamp.  Compared to other #1s from around the world with eagles or coats of arms, or better engraving, it doesn't stand out.  Sure, there are plenty of worse #1s, mostly due to the crude printing techniques available in some parts of the world over 160 years ago.  But it was a "ho hum" moment ...