Pushing 330,000 All Different Worldwide Stamps In One Collection .

One of my many side collections .

floortrader, another beautiful page. I have a couple questions. I assume you're pulling the stamps from stock you picked up from auction. Do you generate the pages as you need them or had you printed them previously? And, based on my own experience, you must spend a great deal of time each day with your collection. You have a dedication I find hard to match. From one collector to another, you have a fine collection!

Hi floortrader,

Thanks for sharing so many pages from your collection.

I enjoyed seeing your Hansa stamps. I only have a small number of the German local issues but I do have an old Michel catalogue and I thought you might be interested in their identification.

These particular stamps were issued by seven different companies/cities:

Row 1:

Stettin B - Mi 7
Breslau E - Mi 9
Breslau E - Mi 11
Breslau E - Mi 8

Row 2:

Mannheim B - Mi 1
Königsberg - Mi 6

Row 3:

Dresden C - Mi 96
Posen - Mi 12
Posen - Mi 8

Row 4:

Lübeck B - Mi 5
Königsberg - Mi 3

The above are my best guesses but there are some plate differences listed and I've ignored shades.

When several companies issued local stamps in the same city Michel labels catalogues these as "city name" + A, B, C etc.

The companies represented here are:

Stettin B - Privatstadtbrief-Beförderung HANSA
Breslau E - Privat-Stadtbrief-Beförderung HANSA
Mannheim B - HANSA Privatpost für Stadtbriefe
Königsberg - HANSA
Dresden C - Dresdner Verkehrs-Anstalt HANSA
Posen - HANSA
Lübeck B - HANSA

Some of these cities now lie outside Germany:

Stettin is now Szczecin in Poland.
Breslau is now Wroclaw in Poland.
Königsberg is now Kaliningrad in Russia.
Posen is now Poznan is Poland.

nigelc, still bringing the information.

Nigelc --- Thanks for that additional information about the German local post . I will add that information to the page .

RTURN 22 --- Thanks for the kind words . Yes I have a stock which has been building for the past 60 years . I do generate the pages as I need them .
My stamp collection has always been a escape from all the other things that life throws at each one of us .

My goal has never been to have a few of the world class gems attached to my name . I look at it as a journey down a path of building a worldwide collection ,I just want to see how far I can go . Guess what I am saying is that I want people to know that I have a decent worldwide stamp collection .

STAMP STORY TO HAVE WITH YOUR SUNDAY MORNING COFFEE .--

Years ago ,I had a worldwide stamp collection about 20 Scott Internationals ,the kind of collection of cheap stamps you can find in any city around the United States by the dozens .
My oldest daughter got a job after school at the local city library .. One of her duties was to change and make exhibits for the display inside the two glass counters at the front desk . She ran into a problem after the third week and needed exhibits for the glass cases/ counters .

She came to me one night while I was working in my stamp room and asked for help . So I said why don't you display some flower stamps from around the world ,so we both made pages with flower stamps . It was a big hit to all the families who visited the library . Soon the management and her boss wanted to know what else she was going to show in the display case .

I wasn't thinking much about it , just cheap stamps getting a lot of lookers each hour 6 days a week for 10 hours a day .

About this time we had the big COMPEX SHOW in Chicago ,which I visited every year for 20 years . both Saturday and Sunday . On Sunday I would spend 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours looking and reading the exhibits . But the odd thing was other people mostly spend 1/2 hour or less than a hour looking at exhibits but the thing was that the room never had more than 10 people in it ,so two rooms and 20 people a hour for 2 days . .
While driving home got to starting thinking about my exhibiting first clearly what I had and the expensive reseached work at Compex was a world of difference . But in one week more people were looking at the glass cases at the library than at the show and it was in the viewing cases for three weeks .

Now years later I still think about that , today we have the internet and displaying stamps online and match that to people attending the Boston Expo which gets more views ?

Getting so deep into the weeds ,you even leave a lot of so called experts behind in your work and studies .

A lot of readers think I am just a "hole filler" with my albums .

Floortrader - My gawd sir....the Heligoland stamp varieties and reprints you posted are blowing my mind. I love Heligoland stamps and I had no idea there were this many varieties out there. ugh....I have so much to learn... looking at all this is giving me a headache (a good headache if there is such a thing). Thanks for posting such interesting and unusual stuff.

BOBCAT --- Thanks ,will post more Heligoland in a few days , I have a few places in my Worldwide Collection where I did a deep dive into the subject .
Working on trying to build a collection with a lot of unusual material and lots of , if not tons of unusual stamps ,that are rarely seen in WW collections

One area that I never seen discussed on STAMP CHAT BOARDS . Is the area of bidders who bid in stamp auctions but miss the winning bid . These have to be a highly valued customer to the stamp auction firm . They run the price up win or lose ,they are the blue chip customer .

These have to be their most value customer base or close to their most value type of customer .
Let me explain that further . There are customers who only become active when their collecting interest lots come up for auction .
So they are bidders who sit on the side line but only bid once a year . Maybe once every three years .

Then they have bidders who buy a few times a year ,these same bidders are active but maybe receive 4 or 5
lots but they have bid on 12 lots and won their 5 lots . Now the key here and value to the auction house was their bidding on 7 lots they didn't win . Now that is the high value to the firm . Why I never seen anything about those kind of buyers . Those 7 and even the winning bids 5 bids could of resulted in not 12 active bids but could be some 20 or 30 bids on the auction houses books .

Now you understand who should be the firms most treasured client ........so where is my Christmas gift of a gold-platted stamp tongs ??

Those are the customers the auction firm needs to jump and serve better .