World Largest -Biggest Stamp Collection

We need a place that the Stamp Community can clear the air about the subject of THE WORLD'S LARGEST STAMP COLLECTION .

This subject has been posted on the internet by many people with a lot of bad information plus claims that are untrue or can not be verity .

Hope to get a place that more information can be exchanged and especially clear the air on the subject from people who are in the community and give those who search thru Google a better understanding of the subject .

Part of this will need to involve identifying what that even means. Largest collection of individual unique single stamps? Does this include all variants? According to what catalogue(s)? Rarities that are all privately owned or in museums? Largest collection including covers? Blocks? Largest accumulation of stamp related items? Up to a certain date or right up to 2026? I imagine this is the first step in the process.

I vote there is no need for such trivia.

Must everything always end up being about size.

I have to deal with old farts that always screwed around with me about how I should collect stamps ,no surprise they are still out there .

If you ask me ,and nobody did .

There is a lot of bad information out there about worldwide stamp collecting , attitude is a problem from some stamp collectors and especially from people who think they are experts . You can see that with how successful the " 330,000 stamps " chapter has been and the results after less than two years on this board . Yes there is a lot of interest on this subject both here and on the numbers who use Google and U-TUBE look at the viewing numbers ,yes interest is worldwide and impressive .

You can collect any way you want to, that is one of the beautiful things about the hobby, but "world's largest" is an impossible question to answer. Too many variables, and how many collectors actually have a clue about how many they have. And some people probably have one hundred albums or more. I once helped a dealer pick up a collection he had purchased, and there was a shelf which ran all the way around a room which was about 20x20, and every inch of the shelf was filled with albums placed vertically on the shelf. The collector had spent 60+ years buying collections and removing the few items he wanted and put the rest on the shelf. Couldn't begin to guess how many stamps were there.

The UNPA still has pallets of mint stamps awaiting sale, would that count as a "collection" since they have near zero postal validity?

That statement above "Who and where is the largest stamp collection " the real answer is NOBODY really knows . There is a lot of guessing but the fact nobody knows for sure . People who have had huge collections don't broadcast the fact .

Even the guy who holds the world record with some "WORLD RECORD " publishing companies . Has a small collections compare to a few stamp auction firms that handled large collections .

If nobody really knows than how do you "clear the air"?

I am not sure why anyone would care how many stamps some other collectors have. I would like to know why this is important to some.

Keijo ,a stamp collector and a stamp blogger did work and researched on this subject back around 2011. I got a few responds and had numbers between 80,000 and 400,000 different stamps . But gave up the project 2 or 3 years later .Because what was missing was detailed statistics . He claimed because " all claims of counting was a waste of time. He didn't question their creditability so he settled with the idea it was virtually impossible to be accurate .

Perhaps a rephrasing would help. There could be two questions. The world's largest all different world wide stamp collection based on the Studystamps count of 679,604... and the world's largest stamp horde. I think many of us could come up with candidates like that. Hang out at a stamp show sometime and listen to dealers and like someone who has gone fishing there are always stories of the "ones that got away."

One of my favorite stories was told by Herman Herst Jr. in Nassau Street about the A.W. Dunning hoard that he got to deal with. I could read that one over and over again!

We got a failure to communicated here .

I am asking two people to delete their negative statements ,reason being this is a attempt to drive more people to this Community Chat Board . This subject on Google and U-TUBE has tens of thousands of clicks .So a positive chat room discussion will return many new readers .
It already shows on Google so hopefully viewer and readers will increase . No reason to start pissing on a subject when it will increase traffic .You can do that after we have a few pages for new readers to follow .

But how is that quantified? By the pound or ton? Number of albums (ten stamps or thousands), stockbooks (same as albums), face value etc..

I have purchased ten carton lots that were full of trash to be disposed of and one carton lots that had more stamps than the ten cartons.

The largest can't be answered so why bother.

Bill Gross had the largest US collection if you go by $$$ value. Does that count? How about a mission mix supplier that has 1000 pounds of on paper? Do duplicates count?

I won't link to the post/poster, because that person didn't insert themselves into this discussion, but in the last week or so, it was posted on here that someone has an updated count




with a cutoff date around 1965.

For verified, counted, different, that one might be the largest among SCF'ers that has been discussed/disclosed to this point?

I'm nowhere near as active here as I once was, so I certainly could have missed other discussions with hard numbers.

This is a lone-wolf pursuit for many, if not most, of the world's collectors. We can't possibly know. Several of us have shared anecdotes about friends or fellow club members with massive collections.