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

Neat find ---- Had a few of these French Military stamps over the years ,but never seen one with a military cancel .

It is stuff like this that makes any collection more interesting to a experience viewer , it is more than just filling blank spaces

There is a good article in this months STAMP COLLECTORS QUARTERLY from Kelleher's Auctions . The article is by Arthur Groten M.D. ,He discusses the difference in stamp collecting and stamp accumulations .

I think his writting is to tame in his article on the subject .

I would say something like 50% of all collectors even 50% of readers here are stuck in that eternal struggle of accumulation of material . They never get much past the basics of buying material ,buying the albums ,buying supplies , buying the software , buying mounts and hinges , they even buy the research lit. and books ------THEN THEY DROP DEAD .

Yep fifty years of attending stamps auctions tells me they just never get to their goals ,the best of them get to a small fraction of building their collection ,

I just bought a nice country collection from a major worldwide collector {major collector --- means he had maybe $250,000 invested in stamps } ,but the two country collections were not real collections ,it would be more accurate to call them accumulations because there was pages from various types of albums with duplicates between them plus nice stamps on auction display cards with prices he paid ,plus stamps loose in glassines . Yes he was accumulating stuff to mount and build his collection . .

"I make this distinction because the terms are often conflated" A.H.Groten said .

So what we are seeing in the hobby to a large percentage is the goal of gathering as much material as possible and never getting to the point of critical mass to organize and mount these collections before THE COLLECTOR GIVES UP THE GHOST .

Its very easy to fall into the trap of accumulating without properly mounting/organizing. I suspect that most of us have at least some "pending" work to do in our collections in this regard.

On the one hand, having that "goal" to work towards, helps make this a lifetime hobby. Acquisition is part of getting there. On the other hand, it does beg the question, that if you are just accumulating, and not processing at least some of what you've accumulated, then - does that really matter?

Finally finished my Venezuela collection up to 1970 . It is a fun country to collect with lots of interesting subjects that someday I hope to expand on .

Nice! I've always been a sucker for colorful stamps. I'm red green color blind so my color guide is handy!

We now have a new leader for top price paid for a stamp .

We had the Swedish Treskilling in the color of yellow at close to $3,000,000 .

As of June 3 2023 ,we got a Asian stamp that blew that away which sold at public auction for 5.4 million Euros .

The stamp is the Japanese 500 mon with inverted center . Here is the stamp ,this is my copy of the 500mon which is a forgery and NOT A INVERTED CENTER .

$5.9 million

Good to see a strong showing of Worldwide Collections at yesterday's Kelleher's Auction .

The large auction lots did well ,these are the lots that contain multi-volume collections of the world . They also had good results in the single volume country lots but I have a extra interest in the larger lots which contain mounted worldwide .

It seems when the auction firms shows random pages and give a total number of stamps ,they are getting over 10 cents per stamp ,which is a far cry from the 2 cents per stamp that I remember from the auction firms of the 1990's .

The key here is a good description and photos , without numbers and pictures it gets to be a riskey gamble to bid on these lots .

Paul, to your reckoning do you feel the market for auctioned collections has maintained the copetitive intensity seen during the 2020 pandemic?

Yes ,from about 2020 we have seen a move up in price on large collection lots .

If your watching a few major auctions over the past few months ,you would notice that the Investor /Speculators are exiting the Philatelic market . Let me explain what I am seeing .

You can see this at 2 auctions ago at Schuyler Rumsey selling huge lots of worldwide with huge catalog values , these are better sets with catalog values from $50.00 to a few thousand per set , same in their previous auction again a few months ago . Then Kelleher Auctions over the last few days offers the same ,they called it the "professors lots " again huge catalog better sets and get this those lots are on the original purchase cards with descriptions from 5 to 15 years ago . So they are purchased but never put into a album or on pages .......when you buy and leave it on the previous firms cards that is buying for investing most likely . Look at the Kelleher Auction stuff maybe $500,000 catalog of material sitting for many years and now offered for sale ,that is not a dealer selling inventory when it is that old . Sure maybe a dealers likes building a huge inventory but the short answer he was investing or speculating .

Look at the SWISS PAX set was cataloged at $600.00 ,I bought mine from a Kelleher Auction for $200.00 back in 2010 and now 13 years later both Kelleher and Dutch Country has them this month for around $50.00 a set . That is a example of a dying speculative market .

I'm not tracking with this.

He's taking a commodity trader view and suggesting that in a weak economy, people who toyed with seeking returns from buying and selling collections in the "under-valued" range rather than "investor grade" (see R. Lehmann in Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/richar...26770c5fae), have figured out that profiting in the sector is too much work, so they are dumping those collections and perhaps seeking safety in real estate or different commodities. It's certainly possible.

CJPALERMO ---Thanks for that link in your posting , it is a well written piece. It tells a lot about the stamp market place and how the trend is changing .

As any market,everybody sees things differently ,but the author has many years of experience and insight,I like how he breaks it down with his 60,000 investment grade stamps ,I never thought to look at it in those terms .t .

Richard Lehman has been around stamps for a long time. I actually worked for him for several months in around 2008 or 2009 building photos and descriptions for his website. He had big plans to expand his website into something along the lines of stampworld.com in that he sought to have every US and worldwide stamp listed with a reference image. Through his contacts with US dealers, he had many committed to listing their inventory for sale on the site. The project was suddenly halted but I never knew why, and I never saw an upgraded version of his website. I think it was called something like stampsearch.

Floortrader, by completing Venezuela, do you mean every stamp from 1859-1970, including BoB? If so, that's pretty impressive!