Help With My Grandfather's Serious Collection?

Phate008,
Thank you for following up and posting the results of your visit. I hope this all turns out to be a good experience, have you considered getting additional opinions/estimates?

If not, please let us know how this turns out after the auction ends and you are paid. Bringing this story full circle, and hearing how you end up feeling about the entire experience, will be of great help to others in the future.
Don

Boy, I'd like to have some of those stamps.

Jack Kelley

Yeah, I completely forgot about the discussion about that particular stamp. Then again I could be mistaken and he may have said IF this was a #313 it would sell for that. I had to cancel and remake this appointment 4 different times because of different reasons, and this time I went despite being pretty sick with a flu so I may just be relaying information incorrectly. In any event we'll see if they find anything good, and I'll update when they send the catalogs.

51studebaker, I took these to probably around 5 or 6 dealers, and got advice from one other auction house, but I was most impressed with Kelleher's process and the work that goes into creating their auctions. When looking at receipts, a few of the stamps my grandfather purchased were from Kelleher so I figured it was probably best to let the cycle continue.

Any experienced appraiser could tell at a glance whether the stamp was perf 10 or perf 12, so I think you are right.

The auction for this collection ended today so I just wanted to update. The collection was separated into 4 lots. The good chunk was the binder I posted which had an auction estimate of 4500-6000 and the price realized was 5100. The smaller ones had estimates of 500-700 w/ 780 final, 300-400 w/ 330 final, and 800-1200 w/ 1080 final. The total estimate was 6,100-8,300 and final price was 7,290. Not bad at the end of the day considering I was expecting that it possibly could sell for a lot less. The weather wasn't great today (snow) so I thought that might hinder the bidding, but I guess a snow day could have also brought in some more online/phone bidders. All and all I think it worked out great so I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to respond here and help me out. If you want to look at the lot description or check it out this was a part of auction #697 at Kelleher auctions and the lot #'s were 3018, 3113, 3167, 3209. Again, thanks everyone for the help.

Thanks for the update. Separated into 4 lots and none individually is the norm these days. A fair and good conclusion.

Glad to hear that things worked out well with Kelleher. It sounds like you had just the right material for all that. And I noticed that they identified the #480 as such and not as a #313.

Did you attend the auction?