Sandipex and a box lot

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 $5-10 each.

I want to write some blog posts about exactly how I broke those down or restored them, removed dupes to improve its sales appeal, how I repriced them, all the odd items I found, and so on.

First I pulled out this tiny old album. 

 

It was a mess, with stamps just falling out, but the underlying album was really attractive and historic, with gorgeous labels on the inside front and back covers.  It turned out the collector glued in a lot of blank pages, multiplying the clutter.   What a mess.  I figured we should remove all those junk pages and restore the album as best as we could.  We left most of the stamps alone, but did pick out the stationery clips, revenue stamps and some of the old postmarks as a sort of payment for our trouble.   Now, it's so much cleaner, and I could see having it on our table for $10 or $12 with some good 19th century picks left for someone to find.  I already have the picks lined up on stock pages, ready to scan.  Probably $10 of lots.

And that was the smallest part of that box lot.  Those pulled-out pages of clutter would be a hard sell, but there are still plenty of old stamps there.

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