Check Out Some Of These Stamps I Received

http://www.onlinephotogallery.com/stamps.htm

I posted a message about a week ago. My mom sent this collection that my grandparents had been saving for me for years. I started photographing a fraction of the stamps and soon realized that even putting them on the web was going to be a big project. If this is the wrong forum to show these in let me know. Thanks.

Didn't wait for it all to load because I am at the moment on dial-up.

However the 10 - 12 rows I saw indicated negligible worth.

It's a nice starter collection. I hope you will consider building it up. I see a couple of stamps that might currently catalog in the $1+, but the great majority will catalog for <$1 or at the catalog minimum of 20c. The true value of this collection is in its gift of love from your grandparents. I hope it will get you more interested in collecting stamps and organizing the collection!

It would appear that you have a wonderful grouping of stamps representative of many countries. Perhaps after studying them you might find a country or a topic that interests you.

Thanks everyone for the input. This is only a small fraction of the collection. It was the easiest to photograph because most of the others are marked assorted. There are thousands of loose stamps, unfortunately I don't have the time and my kids aren't the stamp collecting types so they will be sitting in my closet along with my baseball cards for a while till I can photograph more and possibly sell them. Is ebay a good place to sell them? I was thinking of putting up a small lot and leaving the ad up for 30 days for maximum exposure. ebay would be easiest for me. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Have to say something about worth and value being relative things. I have pages of stamps from assorted countries that might not fetch much in terms of cash money on ebay, but it sure was fun getting the glassines full of stamps in the mail, opening them up, spending time putting them in a stockbook, browsing through them and showing them off. (Non-collectors have no idea how much money a collection is worth and tend to be very impressed by the diversity and seeming uniqueness of even a modest collection).

As for the questions from photojunky: ebay is a really easy place to post things like this for auction. Don't be surprised if you don't make a lot of money off this collection, though. Holding onto these sounds like a great idea and if you have kids, you never know when one of them might develop some interest. Being small windows through time and space, stamps can be very entertaining. Or maybe that is just at my place, since I got rid of the TV and video games a long time ago...

Hehe, I still have these things, but hardly ever use them.

photojunky: What you have is a collection of what I would call the basics. Everyone who collects stamps from these countries has these already, often in great abundance for the most part. My advice would be to group the stamps by country, and sell country lots. If you have many duplicates, use them to create a few identical lots to sell one right after another. You are looking for the novice and impulse buyer, therefore a 30-day auction is probably not advised unless you are selling your whole collection at once.

I am sure others here may have other or differing advice to offer and I would encourage you to take in their suggestions as well.

This is the reason why I returned to collecting used worldwide stamps.

Yes, I have collected long enough to know which ones are valuable (according to the catalog); but I find time and time again, it's the minimum catalog stamps that give me the most fun.

Enjoy ALL your stamps, regardless of what the catalog wants you to think they are worth!

k

Nice to see some world wide Airmail stamps in your mix!

I know what you mean with that! I'm in a permanent state of disorganization now, I buy mountains of cheap stamps faster than I can ever hope to sort them. But when I last had some semblance of control over that (ahem, about 20 years ago, cough cough), I had my database organized around the minimum catalogue value stamps. Every one of them was listed, and the goal, hopeless though it may have been, was to clear out all of the minimum value stamps off of my wish list.

I remember being extremely weak with my collection of Albanian stamps - over 1100 minimum value stamps in the Scott catalogue and I had something like 26 of them. So, Albania is still one of my standard searches when I'm in the mood to find more stuff I'll never get sorted. ha ha

And hey, I'm probably down to only about 850 more minimum value Albanian stamps left to go!

Ryan

Holy smokes that's a great start! I really dig the small town precancels.

Welcome photojunky!

ebay can be fun. I like looking at stamps sold in lots from worldwide or separate countries starting at a low price 99c to see if someone is selling something I may want.

If there is something in the mixture or small selection I do buy it and sometimes the other stamps are fun to go through. Sometimes I put the others aside either to go through later (in case I have new collecting interests) or to sell back on ebay (sometime).

If you don't know what you have exactly try putting them up in world or worldwide lots at 99c with reasonable shipping. You don't have to be really low on shipping and handling, just reasonable. Too high upsets people (me included).

See sellers rick4stamps or ericj003 for these types of lots. Or look on your own.

People like seeing what they are buying. Do the little pic for the gallery photo but do a large photo for the description so people will really see them. Try not to make it too big in file size. Not everyone has high-speed internet connections and might go elsewhere if the page takes too long to load.

Try to put something that looks interesting ot pretty in each lot to help with the curb appeal (house selling terminology). Try to grab the buyers interest.