ScottV Stamps

After writing about the Under-Collection in the last post, it seems like the natural follow-up would be the "Gotta Keep Them All" school of collecting, where owners just fill stock pages with every copy of every stamp they find, hinging down hundreds of the same stamp, book after book of them. I suppose these books are usually made for trading, although if I put together a trasing book, I would have as much variety as I can pack onto the pages.  If someone doesn't want that 10k stamp from Russia the first time they see it, why would they want a whole page of them? In my own collecting history, the one thing these books are good for is picking through them for postmarks, which I have done on many occasions.  If the stamps are old, then we can search them for tiny design differences (flyspecking) or plate positions.  I admit have spent hours staring at pages of penny reds over the years, just trying to grasp all the details. It's just another style of collecting.  Mayb...

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...