Gotta Keep Them All

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.  Maybe the collector found the stockbook and bought it because they were looking for something specific, or it was just tucked in with other volumes.

This also reminds me of the S&H Green Stamps we had when I was a kid.  You would fill every page of the coupon book with those little stamps and then the whole book was worth a small discount somewhere.  It doesn't work with common stamps from Denmark, though ...