Can Someone Get Too Obsessd With A Stamp?

The internet is a guerrilla marketing wunderkind. Not just "investments" like metals or stamps but anything you can think of. Household products are shunned or have huge runs on them based upon amplified posts with no real known origins. The influencer thing is serious business and the most effective aren't seen as influencers at all. Quite the time we live in being bombarded with propaganda on our devices 24/7.

I disagree with the statement about Scott Catalog needs to change the value of the 80 cents Hawaii Plate Block .

Why ?

Because you are witnessing the break up of the worlds largest hoard of that plate block . Let's be honest here,who ever purchased that inventory last week . Purchased it to destroy it not keep it . Meaning they purchased it to use as postage . Sure that stamp will float around the stamp community as a USED SINGLE COPY for years .

The goal of the original buyer is now being realized ---Plate Blocks are now finally going to get rare because they are going to be used up as postage so am I right that those P.B. will disappear and we will have tens of thousand used copies floating around .

Question you now have to think about ---Is now the time to put away a few P.B. away at a much cheaper price than the original buyer .

By my addition, there was only about $44,000 face, not $88,000. Which makes the percentage about 50%, much closer to what high value postage brings.

They will not become "rare". There are many thousands currently in collections, and many more currently in dealers stocks. And probably at least some will be sold as plate blocks as well. So I would not hold my breath waiting for them to become rare.

And they were being successful under the then current rules, rules which were immediately changed to stop the Hunt Brothers and close free market silver transactions. Regulators hate it when others are smarter.

88 for 44 typo corrected as well as any down stream issues.

Still pretty discount postage....now waiting for the mailings to surface.

"Is now the time to put away a few P.B. away at a much cheaper price than the original buyer "

Dream on

"They will not become "rare " who cares ,all they have to do is go up 15% a year . Buying U.S. Postage at 50% is already a big win for me .

They will not go up even 1.5% a year. Sure, if you bought a huge quantity of forever stamps when they were less than .50 each, you have made a nice profit on your mailings. But it's hardly going to make you rich.

This makes me feel a little better about the 500+ US 114 (3c train) stamps I own!

I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it would be interesting to know the backstory about why anyone acquired this many copies of a single stamp. I suspect that the auction house can't or won't reveal this information about the seller. My hope is that there was a legitimate and rational reason for someone having this many copies of a single stamp (e.g., a large florist based in Hawaii that thought they might actually use all of these stamps back in the day). But perhaps the "unhealthy obsession" or "effort to corner the market" explanations are more plausible.

To answer the original question, if you have the collecting "gene", sometimes you become enamored with something. For some it's a desire to corner the market, i.e., for financial gain, for others it's for research purposes, e.g., plating, and for some it's just the notion of something neat or unusual and wanting as many examples or uses as possible.

Is it sane? Not necessarily... but that doesn't automatically make it insane either.

In my case, philatelic hoarding proclivities notwithstanding, there are two stamps that are incredibly scarce that I find intriguing, so I purchase every example I come across, if I can afford them... luckily they don't come around very often so it's not a major concern:

1. Scott # RB3c, the 3-cent proprietary privately perforated ("sewing machine perfs"). I have 4 examples.

2. Scott #R19a, the 1st issue 3-cent telegraph, privately perforated ("sewing machine perfs"). I have 5 examples.

In a more general sense, I try to acquire every illegal/improper use I see that has a U.S. revenue context (postage stamp used as revenue on document, revenue stamp used as postage on cover, non-documentary used as documentary). This covers a lot more ground, so there are more out there that come around.

Unlike expected/mandated uses and rates which can be definitively catalogued and thus a finite list, unexpected or improper uses really cannot be. There is no finite list and no such thing as a "complete" collection. There is no "checklist" for items that have yet to be discovered. It's not like Durland plate numbers, where certain plate numbers are known to exist per records, but no examples have surfaced.

It's not possible or likely until or unless one shows up... which to me is the thrill of the chase.

I would not say I am obsessd with stamps ,but stamps have been my escape from everything and everybody all my life .

It was my quiet time .

I am certainly obsessed, and have been since I was 3, but never in that direction. I will pick up any double transfer/foreign entry I find when sold as an ordinary stamp.

Four versions of one particular and unusual stamp, and five of another, seems interesting, and makes for a fascinating story.
On the other hand, having tens of thousands of a single stamp MIGHT be an interesting story, but I worry that it's either a weird obsession or some sort of bizarre (and unsuccessful) financial scheme.