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

I have several collections (all common) and there are plenty of stamps to keep one busy to sort, identify, and even mount if I get the mood.

GeoffHa -----Agree with your posting , there is a certain progression we as stamp collectors go thru .

I can detail the progress I made and have to believe it is the same for many others . At a young age ,started with buying worldwide mixtures . The first few purchases were 100 W.W. stamps thru mail order at 10 cents each but after the first 3 mixtures the amount of duplicates kept increases. By the 4 or 5th lots purchased ,there were few new stamps .
This progression went on for the rest of my life, until country collections or area collections like French Colonies or Spain with Colonies went into the hundreds of dollars .After 15 years of that ,now buying better sets or specialized studies .
I think most collectors go thru this building process of growing or expanding their stamp collection .

Thanks floortrader and GeoffHa. I appreciate the advice and perspectives. At my age you'd think I'd have all this stuff figured out but as with other things its a work in progress.

Apologies for some of my long winded posts. I literally have no one to sort through some of these things. Although I just joined the "local" stamp club that's a hour and a half drive one way and only meets once a month. Those folks seemed OK but it will take some time to establish relationships.

One mistake I made when I had some money to waste on stamps was not to go for a decent France collection at the outset. By the time I blew some money on a fairly large collection, I'd already acquired album after album with the accompanying duplicates. Should have saved some money by blowing a little more on something better at the outset. Same with French Colonies.

GeoffHa ----- Think we are all in the same boat here about buying stamp .Thru the years every collector will say the same, should of bought better and gotten a larger assortment . I go thru this with "should of reduce my previous purchases and saved longer to get "better stuff" in the next up coming auction .

It would be fun to go back in time to the stamp club that I joined back in 1966 . Maybe any club that far back and try to explain my collection of 2026 to them .

Start with the amount of different stamps that has been issued ,then explain all the new countries since . Then the surprise that in 2026 many of us print our own pages and don't buy albums not W.W. or county specialist albums . . A surprise would be that a lot of collectors never been in a stamp store .
The biggest surprise would be that stamp buying is done at home 24 hours a day and stamp auctions are done while I am washing dishes at home or other projects not sitting at a stamp auction 1,000 miles away .

So much that they wouldn't believe it with their time of 25,000,000 stamp collectors in the U.S. that today there is less than a 100 hundred thousand

Imagine what the 1966 crew would have said if you suggested that hinges would skyrocket to $30 a package.

Imagine how many of those collectors would have begun stashing cases of Dennison hinges!

Funny you mention stashing good hinges , I just received my auction lots from Rasdale's last auction { they have been my supplier of stamp hinges for 15 years} .
They had a supply lot box up for auction which stated hinges ,they shown 2 or 3 packs of Dennison Hinges , What I received was 7 packets of hinges plus a small box {new} of 1,000 hinges . So the purchase price came out cheaper than cost of just the hinges not counting the full banker box of mounts , got lots of blank pages for the Scott series of albums also .

GT350 ---- Nothing like having paid 25 cents for hinges and then selling them for $30.00 ,with my luck, mine would be all stuck together because spending 12 years in the heat and humidity of Florida in the garage .

Something a little different; seen plenty from Belgium. These are the first in my collection from the Netherlands. They must have hitched a ride to get here.

Working on updating my India material .

GT350 - Nice revenues ,your more complete than the few I have ....nice .

I have not counted my stamps but want to have a good sample and coverage up to 1970 across Steiner/Specialty pages. I like knowing what I have and what major numbers I may or may not be missing from a set.

Moving country lots (purchased from ebay) from Scott International to Steiner created a lot more blank pages and spaces. I printed an Oceania album which needs more stamps to prevent the ones I do have being diluted in the "ocean" of blank pages.

I also try to avoid singles of CTO sets which also creates a lot of white space (pages with 2 sets and one stamp per set).

I know I can print just the pages I need--which is what I do selectively when I'm not expecting to ever have many of that country but for most I like getting the printing done vs. printing and sorting pages each time I start wanting to mount and selecting the binder that is sized for the pages.

I have realized that affordable lots tend to create a lot of duplication and getting the next level of completion often is done buy purchasing a more comprehensive collection at higher price...which I should have just done in the first place.