ScottV Stamps

The Postal History Foundation has a lot of mixtures available.  They always have off paper world mixes for about $40 per pound, and the volunteer asked me if I wanted larger stamps or smaller ones.  At one glance, I knew I wanted the smaller ones.  Instead of pretty topicals, the smaller mix had older stamps, and way more of them per pound, not to mention how many postmarks I expect to find. I had a few nights to fiddle with them in hotel rooms, and picked some countries or groupings that had good quantities, like early Belgium, early Poland, pre-war Japan, Germany AMG, Germany Reichspost, and postmarks, of course.  I soon had enough Belgium that I could split out some specialty batches: railways, precancels, early issues with tabs, even a few of the "-10%" variants. Here's a shot of the mixes back at home. I started sorting them by first letter, with a quart baggie for each letter (although some letters like D-E and K-L never have huge amounts, so they can go togeth...

I just bought a big box of mixtures that was all sorted by country into legal-sized envelopes.  I like mixtures, and sorting through them is one of my favorite parts of the hobby.  But there's also something routine about a box full of country envelopes.  It's usually the same cheap, general stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised when these envelopes were stuffed with recent issues, even more so when I saw the best mixes were from Latin America.  In a typical pound of worldwide stamps, you might find a few hundred Latin America, and only a handful of those will be recent issues.  But here, the charity that put this together must have had multiple missions in those countries.  Imagine my surprise to find about 1000 stams from Venezuela from 1990 to 2020.  I see those so rarely, I actually had no idea the price ranges, or even which stamps were definitives.  I finally have a big enough sample to study up on the different issues and see how the mark...

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 ...

I always enjoyed buying worldwide mixtures on or off paper and sorting them out.  My first sort of a big mixture is usually by first letter of the country name, but sometimes I simply sort by continent first.  Since I am fascinated with postmarks, I often keep a pile of those on the side.  When sorting A to Z, having 26 piles would take up too much space, but there are some first letters that are hardly used at all, so piles like D-E, J-K, N-O, P-Q, U-Z just happen naturally.  This will still fit in two lids of bankers boxes, four rows of three piles in each lid.  I have always had cats, so it's easy to stack the lids and put them in the closet if I don't finish the sort in the first sitting. There is a general economics of getting a general world mix at maybe $180 per 10 pounds and ending up with some smaller amounts of much less common mixes.  Country-specific mixes always cost more on the source price lists, so maybe an ounce of Japan might sell for $6, ...