The Under-Collection

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 started taking off all those unser-stamps and putting them on their own black stock pages for imaging, and in some cases, those hidden stamps turn out to be a significant collection on their own.

Oddly, those same collections also had glassines with mint sets taped onto the backside of the pages.  I suppose these were going to replace some of the stamps on the main pages, but now I can't help thinking of those as the "Side-Collection" and they can be an impressive lot.

Just some thoughts on dealing with different styles of collections.