New From Northern New York

Hello - just found the forum today and thought I'd sign on. Been collecting a bit , but inherited a fairly large collection a dozen or so years ago, that was started back in the 1930s. Thought this forum might be a spot to investigate into what I have. Cheers, Tom

Would love to some some scans. Start with the earlies.

Hi Tom,

Welcome to the best stamp Forum you're likely to find.
This membership is filled with many stamp experts and folks with decades of various types of stamp collecting experience.
My education has been greatly enhanced due to the willingness of many fellow members to share their time and expertise.




Many folks come to this community in order to find out if inherited collections might be valuable. I suggest a few things to consider:

1. It's impossible for this forum to appraise an entire large collection. Best approach is to provide a few hi-res quality scanned images of the first page with the oldest stamps from several countries. Stamps must appear large and clear.

2. Members will want to know a) if you plan to collect and expand the collection, or b) liquidate collection.

3) Members will suggest that you have the collection appraised by a couple reputable stamp dealers to get an idea of value (offers likely to be <15% of catalog value).

4) Members often suggest that a new collector or new owner of a collection do some research to determine if the collection includes more valuable stamps. Most good libraries will have stamp references such as the Scott Stamp Catalogues which can easily help you evaluate some of the oldest stamps in your collection (which are more likely to be higher value). I have purchased used library copies of the Scott catalogues at very reasonable prices on Amazon or ebay.

Hope this helps!

Also, an other way to begin to understand "what you have" in a collection...

is to spend some time comparing your collection with those for sale online.
ebay frequently has large collections that you can track to become familiar with winning bids for auctions, or sales using a fixed price.
Key to keep in mind if you are simply trying to determine "value" is that some 90% of all stamps are worth very little having catalog values of 20 or 25 cents. However, you should focus on evaluating the earlier "classics" printed between the 1840's and 1920's. In many cases higher value stamps fall into this 70-80 year period.

Thanks for the info and tips. Browsing thru the stamp book - it's a 1938 edition of "The International Postage + Stamp Album - I copied a few of the "unmarked" stamps from various places - Here's a small sample -