San Diego Stamp Show 2025

We went down to the San Diego Stamp Show today.  It was a 3-day show running at the Hilton Mission Valley.  In theory, a collector could go down there on multiple days and spent hours and hours at a show like that.  The exhibits were amazing, as always, including one for 1608-1750 Italian letter sheets, one showing foreign postal services in Palestine pre-WWII, and one that was a collection of fine profiles of cachet artists.  As always, there are exhibits of things I have never heard of, even after 50 years of colleting. In this case, a series of panels of California Gold Rush era local revenue stamps, and one with some amazing examples of Nevada state revenues from the 1800s.  One sad note showed a large Romanian stamp meant for use at an internment camp in WWI, where the design was pulled after 3-4 weeks after the Russians suspected the large size of the stamp encouraged people to write secret messages on the back of the stamp before putting it on the envelope.

The USPS booth was disappointing.  There was a First Day Ceremony at the show but it was for an incredibly boring bulk rate stamp that regular people would never used, and it hardly even had a design, just a blur.  And the selection of stamps on display was terrible, no more than a dozen issues.  There are apparently some lovely new Priority Mail stamps showing galaxies, so that was nice, but when I try to actually use stamps on Priority Mail, the clerks look at me like I'm breaking some rule.  Stamps were meant to go on mail.

The dealer's room was packed as always.  Like usual, I went in with a deliberatrly limited budget, but left with mental notes about how I could spend another $1000 and stock up on incredible material.  What I ended up getting was a book of Tannu Tuva and a stack of Canada NWT covers from Steve Sims.


I passed on a lot of $200+- box lots that just looked junky when I popped the lid to take a look, and a $120 boxlot of stacks and stacks of Christmas Seals -- those really are mostly a dime a dozen.  I like foreign seals, but don't need 20 pounds of common USA stuff.  There were a lot of $1 covers, and also a lot of world-class $1000+ sets of Zeps and other classics.  Always funny to see the full range of stamp budgets from table to table.

One dealer from Iowa had some bins full of lots packed into sheet protectors that just felt different.  For example: sets of 3 sheets of 16 of UN endangered animal topicals ... for $3??  I had to ask if he meant $3 per item.  Nope.  $3 per sheet protector.  My brain said that was hugely undervalues, and we had a lot of requests for animal topicals at the last few shows, so I bought a few.  When I got home, I did a quick check.  For the 2002 animals set, the NY/Geneva/Vienna blocks of 4 were about CV $14, so the set of 3 sheets of 4 blocks came out to $52.  For $3.  Anne is often entertained by how accurate my gut feelings can be, how I can spot the deals.

It is a shame that I can never get to the volume of sales where stamps can be my only job.  Even with 3000+ lots on Hipstamp, sales are disappointing.

Anyway, we got in and out quickly.  We tried looking at all the exhibits, but we always seem to rush through everything and it was stuffy in there.  I thought about going back with more $$ and stocking up on things, but we still have hundreds of lots from last Sunday.  So we were there just under an hour and got some nice specific items to add to our listings and our stock books at the show.

There was an amazing selection of sets, singles, covers, pages, mixtures and whole collections available.  Hundreds of thousands of $$ of material, probably any country I could think of could be found somewhere in that dealer room.

I was bummed that iHobb was not there.  I really need to find some of the little binders for the stock pages we bought last week.  I figured they would have them, and maybe a new catalog or two.  But they did not have a table this time.

I did not get photos of the event, as I don't like posting pictures with people in them without their permission.  But here is a look at the items I cam home with: