The 100,000 Stamp Club

The way to deal with wallpaper countries is to collect them postally used. Yes, it's possible! The bonanza of modern PU stamps that emerged from the International Youth Service (IYS) penpal club correspondence the past ten years has helped this particular endeavor a lot, as they encouraged their members to use commemorative stamps; you can probably still find some of the kiloware that was made from the damaged IYS covers. It's pretty neat to finish a set of nonsense stamps like those Leaders of the World trains or something, postally used.

At 192,000 different I can say there is still a lot of "low hanging fruit" out there. For example, I currently have only 4,096 different from Russia -- there are 8,000 or so regular issues alone (not counting minor numbers!) to date for that country. But since I started my Russia with a couple of nice country collections, I'm more complete before 1950 and much less complete after 1990: so when I want to boost my Russia toward further completeness it should not be too difficult or expensive.

I'm a little obsessive about wanting to know exactly how many stamps I have in albums. Currently tracking at 74,035. Of those, 3,557 are duplicates between my Scott Junior Intl and regular Scott Intl albums, and another 920 dups between my Canada Lighthouse and Canada feeder albums. So that gives 69,558 at last count. Excluding the bunch of old Scott/Minkus albums recently purchased I haven't sorted/transferred out of yet.

Perhaps it's the software developer background, but I like to know those things. My spreadsheet tracks each country, with # of stamps, % complete, % missing for each country, #s for each major period, etc. This is mostly for the Scott Intl (which I now need to adjust since I re-organized them all by country from the original sorting by period). But done the same for specialty albums for Canada and German-related. For Canada, also track percent mint vs. used for each decade and type (e.g. airmail).

Overkill for some I know, but it was really not too much work to get all the initial numbers in, and it's trivial to keep updated as I add new stamps. And I do get enjoyment out of seeing the numbers go up, or seeing a country/period get complete, or completely mint. To each their own :)

110% agree - it is possible. And lots of fun.

That said, I have no objections for CTOs and I do keep them. I think far too many badmouth CTOs blindly, without proper understanding what they truly are and why they exist. There are often times very interesting historical/political/financial background stories behind the CTO-production. So basically learning the history of CTOs is learning the "postal history" of a country (and stamp agencies).






You know, you just described how I got started with "stamp counting", LOL There must be something similar in the way we people with technology background think...

-k-

To find out how many collectible stamps I have would take a lot more work to inventory than I'd ever be willing to spend. I'd have to add a column in excel next to each listing to note the number of stamps for each line and start adding. Yuck.

In the final analysis, I'd rather have 10,000 stamps that are all MNH, in complete sets including all the high values, decently centered and without faults than 100,000 of the stamps I typically see in large WW collections. To each his own.

"To each his own " My Worldwide collection has been influenced by the thousand other collections that I looked thru at various stamp auction firms . Having attended 100's of auctions from Rasdale,Regency ,Richard Drews ,Greg Manning ,H.R.Harmers ,Kelleher and others . Looking at so many gives you a good understanding of what others have done over the past 100 years.

Most worldwide collections are not to my standard of neatness and accurate in its organization. as SHERMAE said "TO EACH HIS OWN"

Is there a 150 stamp club?

Is there a 400K club ? ---- We can wear a sash like the BOY SCOUTS at club meetings or stamp shows with flags or colored ribbons for the countries we collect . Then have a bronze star ,silver star and a gold star for percentage of completion . The more senior members would look like NORTH Korean Army Generals all covered in colorful ribbons .

I think damaged stamps should be excluded from the count of stamps in an all-different collection.

If you are a hinger like me, you could guesstimate how many packs of hinges you have ever used, and multiply by 1000. In other words, have you used more than 100 packs of hinges? I don't think am even half way there.

My question to any "club" members is, how do people physically present and maintain a 100K+ collection? Hinges, mounts, stockbooks, Vario pages?

Indeed; some countries (like Labuan and North Borneo) are actually impossible to complete without CTOs: there are stamps that are only known to exist in that state.

Seigaku - interesting questions. Roughly estimating:

An average Vario page of say 6 rows, 7 stamps in a row, loaded 2 sides = 84 stamps per page.

100,000/84 = approx 1,200 pages. At 90 cents each (using Subway's 10 pack discount + shipping) the investment would be about $1,100 for pages.

How many binders is a tricky question as it depends on your goals in presenting all these stamps. If one assumes 30 pages per binder all in, then you'd have 40 binders total (another $1,400 if using standard Vario binders). Assuming 3 inches per binder (guesstimate), you'd need 120 linear inches of shelf or cabinet space, e.g. 10 feet. None of this calculation includes space for blank pages (not really an issue with Vario pages) or partially filled pages. Might require another 1-2 feet and perhaps 4 to 8 additional albums.

We've all seen images of mega collections like Floortrader's and others, and we know they have a lot more than 10 linear feet of albums on their shelves. Not to mention, his albums (that I know of) are all composed of paper pages, so there are a lot more than 13 pages per inch.

If a collector could somehow create an estimate of how many pages there are per inch in their collection (including the albums and dust covers themselves), plus an estimate of how many stamps per page, it would be possible to roughly estimate how many stamps exist in a collection.

Who will try this first?

Seigaku - Many has already shared light on that question at this thread:
https://goscf.com/t/40901&whichpage=1

I thought I was doing well with about 5,000 !!!!!!

How can you count 100,000 ?

Is that in one big album :)

I reckon 15 years of collecting = 5000 stamps so far = 5% of what is needed
so 15 years x 20 = 300 years to achieve 100K .............i don't have time :(

Who says it hasn't been done? [shameless self-promotion] Just read my website [/shameless self-promotion]

Page thickness and stamp thickness are somewhat well known, so it is basically just simple math:

With thin paper (80gms) you are looking approx. 125 pages per inch.
With heavy paper (250gms) you are looking approx. 60 pages per inch.
With stockbooks (300gsm) you are looking approx. 40 pages per inch.

Then you have to know how much binding, dust covers etc. add up (with stockbooks its about 25%)...

So when I know my collection houses 4½ shelf meters (of which approx. 3,4 meters is pages with stamps), that's about 5,400 (stockbook) pages.

And since I know there's approx. 25 stamps per page, counting the total is easy.. Resulting 135k stamps is 20k more than my count. But there's a simple explanation for that - the varieties. I don't include them to my counts. So likely I've got 20k varieties...

And when you know stuff like this, you can easily estimate how much shelf space you will need in the future, how many stockbooks/albums you need to buy etc.

This is not exact science, but it will give you a ballpark.




Incrementally. You do a base count when you have something small (say 5k stamps). And then when you add 20-30 stamps a day for a decade, and you have reached 100k.

-k-

Now you tell me! I had already counted 150,000 stamps and now I have to go back and check each one for hidden damage!
Don