Organizing Duplicates

Rod, Bobg's idea is not that farfetched..the less duplicates glutting the market the better..a couple of the guys showed stockcards of duplicate U.S. Stamps..ok now they are stored..what is going to happen to 10 or 20 copies of each stamp ???? People will buy one copy of a stamp..but rarely a glassine full of the same stamp !!

Hi Charles
I'm not sure what the situation in The States is, but here north of the 49th parallel, Canada Post sells Vario pages and stock books. Have you tried your local post office? Just a thought.

Organized? I have no idea what I have for dupes, well at least this pile is all BOB. I have piles that I put into ziplocs, so much for all stamp collectors having OCD ?

fredcdobbs - now I know who I should trade dups with!

fredcdobbs: Hey do you want to sell that first bag of Dups you have there in the picture? Looks like you have some stamps I don't have.

Crikey, how can you say that!
that is no reason to subscribe to waste.
Currently there is a potential of two stamp collectors
born every second on this planet.

Because you are satisfied, burn the rest?
you are obviously from a consumer society.
If you cannot handle it, pass 'em on.
I am rather surprised you ahve taht opinion...

My Wife came up with a GREAT way to store Dups. She bought me some clear Acid Free plastic Baseball card collector pages and a two inch notebook from Walmarts to put them in. Each page has 9 pockets. I put the single in there own pouch and wrote the Scott's number on the back of the stamp in pencil. The stamps I have several of I put in their own 1 1/2 x 2 inch clear bag and Cataloged the Scott's number on the envelope. That way they don't fall out. It took me three days to catalog them all but they are very well organized now. The Mint Stamps I left in one envelope and they are all mixed still. I'm not sure if I'll make a divider out of a Manilla folder and catalog them separately or not. haven't decided yet. The whole thing cost my wife $11. Also I haven't decided weather to put them in Scott's numerical order or not. I could, but I foresee that as I add stamps along they would get out of order gain and again so it would be a constant shuffling.

Well I went ahead and rearranged all my dupes into two disused stockbooks the other night. Besides an evening of blissfully mindless sorting, I now can see what I've got kicking around. If and when I acquire another hoard I'll return to the envelopes, but this makes more sense now.
Guess what I've done is discovered a two step system. It just took me a year and a half to recognize it.

I used to throw all my duplicates into one large box. However, when I started trading with others, I needed a way to sort out my stamps and to see what I had. My first trading experience was with a Yahoo group that did monthly swaps of commemoratives only. My participation in these swaps helped me develop my organizational strategy. I started sorting all the duplicate commemoratives by countries, put all the Christmas stamps in one box, and started on the definitives. Currently, I have one shoebox with envelopes for definitives and one for commemoratives. For those countries that I had large amount of stamps from, I had to find other alternatives. I have used various containers for excess definitives stamps. More recently I have been using extra stockbooks to hold the excess commemorative stamps.

Organized, regimented ! would that be any fun ? I don't know !

That's a practice I wouldn't encourage,

but nice to hear you organisational efforts.

After years of sorting, I find it hard to go past
sorting by year only, and have all one years issues
in one duplicate envelope.

Given all of the varieties now involved in collecting US issues, I have given up attaching catalog numbers to every single stamp, but I have used those small "post-it notes" to handwrite the identity of several varieties of the same stamp and then put all of the stamps with a similar design in one stock book page or in one glassine envelope, etc., then when I do want to separate varieties it's relatively easy because the same-type stamps are all in one place.

As mentioned earlier, I also have used baseball card storage pages. Likewise, you can also use business card storage pages, too. In fact, if you're inclined to shop at the Dollar Stores or similar stores dealing with discount/closeout merchandise, you can often find them at very reasonable prices.