ScottV Stamps

Continuing with the stockbook from last time, the next few pages said "Corner  Letters 240". So, this was another completed sequence, this time capturing all combinations of the letters in the corners, from AA to LT.  A few times in my life, when seeing a stack of these classic stamps, I briefly thought it would be fun to try and collect all those corner letters, but every time my brain said that's crazy, why would I do that to myself? Thousands of stamps had to be picked through to find all those different letter combinations.   I listed this collection also , and for 240 stamps that catalog $3 each, it was hard to figure a good starting price.  I went with $289, but I can always lower it later if there is no interest in the first few weeks.  There is no such thing as an exact price.  Maybe hundreds of collectors will click on it and grumble that I charged too much -- they clearly did not stop and think what was involved in putting this together....

At a private sale for a deceased local stamp dealer, we got another few cartons of albums.  This one was the find of the day: It was a thick stockbook full of Queen Victoria issues from Great Britain, mostly with clear numeric postmarks.  Nothing was selling at nearly the printed prices that day, those are what we might have paid if we found the dealer at a show.  There were a few hundred stamps, listing up to $50 each, but early Great Britain always feels overpriced to me and it was hard to say how the mostly heavy postmarks would affect any prices I tried.  Then there were about 8 pages of just penny reds (Scott #33), and my brain said it was worth a closer look.  There was a note at the top of one page saying "Plate 71 to 224" which is all the plate numbers except the expensive #225.  Sure enough, in tiny numbers in the side scrollwork, it had every plate number as far as I could tell.   I transferred them to 6 new stock pages.  Here is on...