ScottV Stamps

We did the Sandipex stamp show again today (Sunday), but hardly any collectors came by, and half of them were grumpy.  Probably since they're almost all former military, and tomorrow is the inauguration from hell. Anyway, we made a few bucks over $100 and I bought a box of albums from a neighboring dealer for $100 as they were packing up.  That's always the best time for deals.  The box said $150, and they probably would have given it to me for $125 earlier in the day.  End of day?  $100. I looked at a few of their box lots.  This one had some binders with pages that caught my eye.  Packed stockbooks with old narcotics revenues poking out.  Postmarks, precancels, perfins, back of book stuff.  One binder had about 25 pages of Berlin issues with a lot of duplicates tucked under the others.  One binder had on-paper DDR just flopping out as I turned each page, but one pages had mint DDR souvenir sheets from the 1950s and I know those are $5-...

At the stamp show today, I got cornered by a random collector who had three stock books to sell.  One had some good early Canada, one had common Canada and a final page with some revenues, and the other was common 10c-each material.  He started off by complaining, literally that "all the other guys are colluding against me." You know what?  If you're going to start off by accusing people, you're going to have poor results.  He thought they were out to get him because they all gave different answers to "how much is my stuff worth?"  I had to explain that if Chuck said "$20" it means he's clearly not interested.  You're not asking "what is the universally accepted value?" you're asking "what is this worth to you today?" I had to explain that all the dealers here already have a big stock of early Canada.  They're not going to pay top dollar for things they already can't sell.  I tried all different scenarios, an...

The stamp catalogs seem to have a hard time with some modern issues, mostly from African nations where the postal service has been erratic, or places like Afghanistan where the postal service was non-existent for most of the 1990s-2000s.  Sometimes it's easy to find cancelled-to-order or mint examples from after 1990, but we very rarely see postally used stamps from some of these places.  Much less complete covers with stamps on them. While breaking up a collection of Malagasy Republic, it was good to see a page from after 2000.  Those are the hard-to-find items. Here are some examples of stamps that the 2023 Scott catalog could not put a value on ... there is just a dash for a price.  Here are the unpriced #1403A,f: Then there are some where the catalog does price them but at surprisingly high values.  Here are #C200B-C, that listed for $130. As if that's not enough to suggest how rare these stamps can be, and how difficult they ware to research or verify, here...

At the last stamp show where we had a table, one of the other dealers brought a box full of stock books of pre-1940 stamps from various countries.   The Austria books were some of the best stocks of classics I have ever seen. I ended up buying a book that was all Austria offices abroad and revenue stamps.  The offices in Turkey and Crete were fine but while those have had a lot of reprints and forgeries, this batch looked better than most.  Same with the page of Lombardy-Venetia.  I put together about two hundred lots of sets and singles, and a few bulk batches -- you hardly ever see these in batches of 50 or 100 or more. What really caught my eye were the eight pages packed with revenues.   Almost all were from the 1870 series so the variety was not nearly as wide as I thought at the time.   Trying to find a value for revenues is tricky, since the dependable catalogs can be 20-30 years or of date.   So if a stamp listed for $50 but...