ScottV Stamps

The Postal History Foundation has a lot of mixtures available.  They always have off paper world mixes for about $40 per pound, and the volunteer asked me if I wanted larger stamps or smaller ones.  At one glance, I knew I wanted the smaller ones.  Instead of pretty topicals, the smaller mix had older stamps, and way more of them per pound, not to mention how many postmarks I expect to find. I had a few nights to fiddle with them in hotel rooms, and picked some countries or groupings that had good quantities, like early Belgium, early Poland, pre-war Japan, Germany AMG, Germany Reichspost, and postmarks, of course.  I soon had enough Belgium that I could split out some specialty batches: railways, precancels, early issues with tabs, even a few of the "-10%" variants. Here's a shot of the mixes back at home. I started sorting them by first letter, with a quart baggie for each letter (although some letters like D-E and K-L never have huge amounts, so they can go together) .

4/15/2024: We stopped at the Postal History Foundation in Tucson.  I had not been there in about 12 years. They're still going strong, with a whole museum and educational area, tons to do, endless stamps to support and buy, and a world class research library with about 30,000 volumes.  They have many shelves of lots ready to buy, from pound mixes to individual stamps, bins of 10c covers, you name it.  For the rest of our 6-day trip, I had the urge to go back and help sort stamps, or buy more stamps to sort at home.