ScottV Stamps

One thing that happens a lot is selling stamps to buyers back in the home country.  I can't say how many thousands of items I have shipped back home.  Here is a pair of First Day Covers from Korea that I got last week.  They don't mean much to me.  I picked them because I have a vague interest in the Universal Postal Union issues and anniversaries. But these sold for $3 in less than an hour after posting them.  One can't help but wonder if I should have started the price a bit higher.  Or would they then sit there for years, unwanted.  I'd rather start something low and have it sell.  And I don't want to drag out the catalogs for every little thing.  It's usually disappointing.  No point looking them up now.  Just go with the gut, move on to the next piece. So, they're headed back to Korea now.

As my previous post mentioned, we have been trying to keep the international side of our hobby alive.  It has become incredibly frustrating, with USPS shipping costs having gone up x5 or x6 for small overseas parcels in the past decade.  We keep having to think about no longer shipping outside the USA.   We only ship lots under two ounces overseas these days, but we just had an order where a customer bought 8 items, which came out to be a 4-ounce large envelope.  I filled in the usual customs form, but then the clerk got involved. He said he can't put a customs form on an envelope without upgrading it to a small package, so the only options for tracking were $17 (package), $24 (add registered) and $37 (global Priority).  It was a $50 order.  I really wanted to offer a tracking number, but it could not be done without taking a 30-65% loss on the shipment.  OMG.  I have shipped over 15,000 mailings over my 40 years in business.  We ...

About one out of four of the big collections I handle have a detail which always bugs me: hinging stamps underneath other stamps.  It almost makes sense when the top stamp is mint and the under-stamp is used, to show that you found one of each.  But it's can get really sloppy, making the whole page an unsightly jumble for no apparent reason.  It's already a considerable challenge to fill most album pages for a country.  Why would you need to have more than one of each stamp, and then why overlap them so you can't even see them all?  On some pages, only a few stamps are overlapping, but on other pages it's 80-90% of them. If I am going to scan the collection and sell it, it's just a visual mess and makes it hard to appreciate just how many stamps are on the page.  I have come to think of the hidden stamps as the "Under-Collection".  The collection under the main collection. With some of the recent collections I have been selling for the library, I start...

I have seen some spectacular stamp art on walls at stamp shows over the years, where artists have cut and pasted thousands of stamps to make images.  My reactions to it are complex.  First, there's admiration for the work that went into it.  Then there is some annoyance that our cherished collectibles have been trivialized or treated like things of no value to be cut up and glued.   Then again, if they are common junk stamps, why not?  They could either sit in envelopes in boxes in closets, never seeing the light of day, or they can be used for art and craft projects, presented in clever new ways, given some kind of purpose again. There are a lot of sellers on eBay, Etsy, and HipStamp who sell bulk stamps specifically to be used for crafting purposes.  It might be 100 red queens or a mix of 50 green stamps from all over the world.  Sometimes, these are little packets of better stamps, like cartoon character commemoratives from Japan, you name it. ...

Sometimes, the dealers at our local show (Sandipex in Poway, CA) bring a box of mixtures.  I find these hard to resist.  Back when I was doing this as a half-time job, and came to all the shows I could get to, some of the guys would keep a big big box of things for me so when I showed up I would be hooked.  That was a lot of fun, and I could probably ask them to do so again, but time and the pandemic have thinned out the events over time. Here are the mixes I found today: This was just a fraction of what was in that big box on the table, but these were the ones that appealed to me.  The world mix looked like it had a bunch of Malaysia in there, and it turned out to be over a half pound of Malaysia in there (nothing fancy but it's an hard mix to find). For the others, they were unusual quantities for those countries.  Costa Rica usually only shows up as a glassine or two here and there, but this baggie had about 1000 of them.  The Spain mix had a good range ...

One thing I always look for at local shows are the dealers who have country folders.  These are stacks of album pages usually stapled to a folder with an overall catalog value and typically a big discount.  These are usually priced from 20% to 30% of the total value, and they are easy to flip through. I look for ones from places that always sell well, like Italian Colonies, Offices Abroad, etc, or I look for a good chunk of complete pages or an overall high count of complete sets.  If it's all broken sets or mixes, it's not going to be easy to flip. I also typically make a stack of about 50% over my budget and then slowly pick through them and put back ones that don't measure up to the others.  I have 40 years of know-how in this business now, and have a good eye for what will make good lots and what won't. Today we were at Sandipex in Poway, CA.  There were about $500 of other folders of those Italian back-of-book issues, so I wish I had more of a budget. ...

While you can get almost anything you want from any of a thousand online sites these days, there's no substitute for walking into a local stamp show where you've known the guys for decades and looking through their hoards.  Here is a bin full of stamps I got today: Everything in here was mint never hinged complete sets.  Individual glassines boasted catalog values of $45 or $70 or more.  Even if it was all $5 to $10 items, wow, look at the quantity. I suppose that the seller didn't want to put the time into this batch.  It will take time to check the catalog prices and numbers and scan them all, and post them to some site, but the sales will trickle in for years to come.   Maybe the seller bought it from someone else for $180 and just marked up the price.  That's a good move.  No need to do all the work to get every penny out of it, just take a bonus now and move on to other items.   Either way, we had fun doing a preliminary run through...

Once people find out you are a "stamp person", it's just a matter of time before some friend of a friend gives said friend a box of stamps to give to you, so you can evaluate their little treasures for free.  Or if you're running a table at a show or have any kind of storefront, people will bring in their box or album directly, whether you're obviously busy or not. I think we all know what these collectors are thinking or expecting.  Maybe you can do all the hours of work for them?  Sure, they usually say I can do all the work and keep "like 20 or 30 percent."  I won't even get into the huge disparity between what the owners think their stuff is worth (must be big $$$ in there) and what it looks like to us (more work).  I don't have the extra hours to do that work.  And half the time we're expected to offer cash on the spot.  But ... I already have a hundred times as many stamps in stock (not joking) and suppliers I trust.  I don't need a...