3 pounds off paper Worldwide

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) .  It will be a long process at about 7000 stamps per pound, but I can already start filling stock pages with some of the batches mentioned above.  It may not be a high-value mix, but there are bound to be some surprises, and I get to feel like Scrooge McDuck diving into a pile of coins.  Rummaging through mixes never gets old.